


Drowning in a Breath of Fresh Air

by Sunflower_Meadows



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Everyone Has Issues, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Hatake Kakashi Has Issues, Hurt/Comfort, I had to change some of the tags to get rid of spoilers, Kakashi does not do feelings, M/M, Namikaze Minato/Uzumaki Kushina - Freeform, Reincarnation, Sarutobi Asuma/Yuuhi Kurenai - Freeform, Self-Insert, Slow Burn, There’s a lot of cursing, a lot of this has Japanese flavor for the authenticity, but don’t worry it can be really happy too, but not a cringey amount, but not too much, gratuitous headcanons and conspiracy theories, in which the main character isn’t actually a Mary Sue because that’s just boring, it gets better and then worse and then better again, it gets really sad in here sometimes, just enough to warrant a higher rated tag, kakashi always finds something to angst about, kishimoto’s timeline is fucked up, rin nohara is everyone’s mom, so i smoothed it out and made my own, you can pry alive Shisui out of my cold dead hands
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25195660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunflower_Meadows/pseuds/Sunflower_Meadows
Summary: The funny thing about dying, she figured, was that it wasn’t quite as meticulous as all the major religions she’d encountered in her life seemed to say. There were no shadowy figures wielding scythes in her final moments, or a gateway into paradise, or even the parallel elevators going up and down her friend had once theorized about on a hazy summer night. No, it was more like a sort of existential blip.One moment she was trapped under the crushing weight of water filling her lungs, and the next she was being born anew.All in all, dying wasn’t a very comfortable thing. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but if given the chance she would really much rather be alive than...here. At least “here” was familiar, at least she knew what she was going to get. This world was heavy with pain, and she knew that fact better than she knew herself. If she could just alleviate some of that, maybe everything would be okay.Maybe she wouldn’t feel so much like she was still drowning.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Original Female Character(s), Minor or Background Relationship(s), Namiashi Raidou/Shiranui Genma, Nohara Rin/Uchiha Obito
Comments: 100
Kudos: 485





	1. The Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Alice is born, deals with a problem, and visits a hospital.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to my amazing friend and beta, @bloodredpomegranate, for helping me bring actual flavor to this story.
> 
> \- Meadows

The funny thing about dying, Alice figured, was that it wasn’t quite as _meticulous_ as all the major religions she’d encountered in her life seemed to say. There were no shadowy figures wielding scythes in her final moments, or a gateway into paradise, or even the parallel elevators going up and down her friend had once theorized about on a hazy summer night. No, it was more like a sort of existential blip.

One moment she was trapped under the crushing weight of water filling her lungs, and the next she was in a very dark and cramped space. The blip in between was that of a pure sort of nothingness, where she supposed it felt a bit like the power going out in her entire _being_ for a very brief millisecond.

All in all, dying wasn’t a very comfortable thing. It wasn’t _uncomfortable_ , but if given the chance she would really much rather be alive than... _whatever_ this place was. It was rather dark and warm and she felt like she was under too many heavy blankets right in the middle of July. If she could sweat, she would have. Then, all of a sudden, Alice was quite literally _pushed_ into an infinitely more uncomfortable position than before. The heat was more intense, and she felt distinctly like a bottle of ketchup that was being squeezed for that very last squeeze of tasty tomato juice. 

She regretted any complaints she had made earlier, this was much worse and she would like to go back to how it was before thank you very much. The process of being painfully squeezed and squished around like some sort of sick stress ball continued for quite a long time, and the buzzing energy from the strange and frankly nerve-wracking sensation only grew as she went through what seemed to be an even smaller and tighter part of the darkness. The fit was difficult, and she tried to make herself as small as possible to make the process hopefully go faster. Unluckily for her, it took quite a long time and only made her internal panicked screaming that much louder. 

Then, it was over. She veritably _popped_ out over whatever hellish place she had just come from, into a brighter and even worse place. It was bright, and loud, and her skin was screaming from the feeling of other hands touching her, and she couldn’t _breathe_ again, and—

Naturally, as soon as she could find a breath, she tossed it back out into the world with a scream. She was screaming, and crying, and she honestly kind of just wanted to go back to being dead because this was _infinitely_ worse than drowning. At least drowning was silent and peaceful at the end.

Voices rumbled around her, and her poor sensitive ears were at last coming to terms with their surroundings because the noise made her want to scream _marginally_ less as each lengthy second passed. Those cold hands from before picked her up — and very distantly she wondered what on earth possessed hands so large as to pick up a grown woman — and she was passed on to another, slightly smaller, set of hands. These hands were warm and sweaty, but oh-so-gentle as they pressed her up against something soft and equally as warm. A soft thudding registered in her ears and resonated throughout her body, and as she counted the regular beats she came to a stunning and profound realization that immediately cut off her crying. 

_Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum._

A heartbeat. She was hearing a heartbeat. Then, suddenly, other factors started to hit her in fast succession as her overstimulated senses started to clear up a bit and she calmed down.

_Big hands, too big, holding her—_

_Loud voices that boomed impossibly large—_

_A heartbeat, steady and way too loud—_

_Pushing, pulling dark space—_

_White walls and the tangy scent of sweat mixed with cleaning supplies—_

Alice's heart thudded a little too fast for what she now realized was a body — too small, _too small_ — that she shouldn’t have. Suddenly, the blip after her death seemed to make so much more sense, terrible sense. The facts were undeniable, and sue her if she became a little upset by the revelation. She was, in fact, a freshly birthed baby.

She started screaming again.

* * *

In Alice’s personal and professional opinion, being a baby was no fun, frustrating, and so incredibly boring that she finally understood why babies cried all the time. There was nothing to _do_ except eat, sleep, and mournfully wait until she had some sort of higher functioning power to utilize. What was especially infuriating was that wherever she was born seemed to speak a language that vaguely resembled archaic Japanese, so she couldn’t even understand most of the things her parents said to her. Back before she died she had taken a year of Japanese in high school to fulfill the foreign language requirement to graduate, but now she found herself wishing she had at least further pursued it into college. Her very meager Japanese helped her understand basic travel phrases as well as counting, but beyond that she was supremely lost.

Her first two months of babyhood passed pretty easily despite the fact that she hated it in this place. It was nothing personal against her new parents, but being a baby was infinitely worse than being dead and she would like to go back to blissful oblivion now thank you very much.

 _At least when you’re dead you don’t shit yourself and get manhandled at all hours of the day,_ she thought, _so that’s a plus point towards death._

Her parents were kind people, they really were, and she felt bad for hating every aspect of the life they were trying to give her. They were probably new parents going off of their youthful faces and the fact that she didn’t really see any other kids running around the house. She figured that they _could_ have a kid out of the house already, but that seemed very unlikely considering the fact that they just looked so _young_. They really couldn’t have been older than their mid twenties, not too far off from Alice’s own age when she died. It was uncomfortable to think that people so close to her old age were already having children. Were they responsible enough? She’d be fine, right?

~~~

Two months and twelve days into her new life, something pretty strange happened. It was a balmy summer night — at least, she assumed it was summer since it was just so _hot_ all the time — and Alice was in the middle of getting fed by her mom. Her dad took it upon himself to tiredly hover nearby as he waited for her mom to come back to bed. That was something she had learned in her time in this household: no matter what, both of her parents would be awake within moments of the other when she cried in the middle of the night. They both seemed to be extraordinarily light sleepers, and if one of them was busy settling her down she had noticed that the other would refuse to go back to sleep until their spouse had finished and made to go back to bed themselves. It didn’t seem very consistent with what she knew about parents and how they worked with new babies Before she had died, but she rolled with it and shrugged it off as a particular quirk of her new parents. 

On this balmy summer night, three things happened before Alice could even blink in surprise.

1\. A man appeared at the window, dressed in all black with a white mask painted to look like some kind of ferociously snarling animal covering his face.

2\. Her dad slid in between the man and his family protectively, pulling some sort of a diamond-shaped knife from _somewhere_ in his vicinity.

3\. Her mom, a half-heartbeat slower than her dad, twisted her body so she shielded Alice from the view of the window.

Then everything was very, very still as blood pounded in Alice’s ears and her breath caught in her throat. The tension in the room was so palpable she was _choking_ on it, so she did the only thing her vocal chords were really capable of at this stage of development and cried. This seemed to break the momentary standoff between her parents and the man as everybody relaxed a little bit — not fully, mind you, she could still feel the activated muscles of her mother’s biceps curling around Alice’s tiny body. 

Her father put away the knife — ah, he had been keeping it on the nightstand — and her mother returned her stance to her previous position as her father stepped forward to open the window. He exchanged a few words with the animal-mask man and accepted a stout green-edged scroll from him. Alice was pondering why a _scroll_ of all methods of information when the masked man literally just...disappeared. One moment he was perched as pretty as you please on the windowsill, and in the next he was just _gone._

Something about the masked man seemed wildly familiar in her mind, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it as her mother started to exchange hushed words with her father. Alice didn’t know why they were keeping their voices down, it wasn’t like she could understand them.

Her mother’s melodic voice was tense and frustrated, but her father’s deep timbre sounded rather sorrowful in return which didn’t quite match up with his white knuckled his grip on the scroll or the worried the pinch in his brows. He sounded so _sad_ and was even a little resigned if his tense shoulders and slumped posture were in any way indicative of his words. Her mother tightened her grip on Alice, and stepped forward to hug her husband as close as she could with one remaining free arm. Her dad clutched her back tightly, and leaned down to press a kiss to Alice’s temple before stepping away and towards the closet.

Her mother watched him pull clothes and scrolls similar to one he was holding out of the closet for a long moment before she left the room and entered the nursery with Alice still tightly held in her arms. As soon as the nursery door clicked shut behind them, she felt more than heard her mother take a very deep breath and exhale shakily. Whatever the thing going on with the masked man and the scroll was, it seemed pretty upsetting for her and Alice suddenly felt a rush of sympathy for this young new mother. As she was gently settled back down into her cushy sunflower-patterned crib sheets, she finally caught sight of her mother’s expression and felt her heart drop through her feet.

_Scared, so scared—_

Her frightened expression cleared when she saw Alice watching her intently, and a smile rose up to replace the tangled web of emotions that had shaken her normally sunny countenance. It wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t her real smile, Alice knew that for certain.

Her mom’s real smile was wide and warm, with a dimple at either side of her full-lipped mouth, and her eyes crinkled sweetly at the corners when she laughed. This smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, and she looked too tired for such a young face. Alice’s skin buzzed, and her mouth felt dry. What was that exchange earlier, if it had gotten her mom so scared and worked up? Was her dad in trouble?

Was it the mafia?! Or rather, the yakuza?

Alice fell asleep fitfully that night, her heart worried over if her family was going to be broken up before she even got to say her first words.

* * *

Her dad disappeared for a whole two weeks after that crazy night, with each day that passed causing both Alice and her mom to grow more and more worried. Alice’s skin buzzed almost constantly as restless and relentless worry built up in her, wondering if that night had been her last with her dad. She didn’t want him gone! He was too young, _she_ was too young. He was sweet, and funny, and he read her stories that she couldn’t make heads or tails of when she started to get a little bored in the afternoons. He always seemed to know when she was feeling restless, and he would play with her until the buzzing settled down again. She would even miss his stupid offensively orange hair and how scratchy his goatee was when he kissed her forehead before bed.

She spent days and days like this, convinced her dad was dead or kidnapped by the yakuza, before the man came again for her and her mom this time.

He showed up while Alice was sitting in her Horrible and Infuriating High Chair one afternoon, appearing at the kitchen window in the same creepy manner as last time. Alice wasn’t very proud of her reaction, but she may have screamed. Quite loudly. In a lot of fear. I mean, sue her, she didn’t want to be baby-snatched by the Japanese mafia whether or not that was an actual thing the mafia did. She didn’t _think_ her new parents were rich or powerful enough to warrant actual child snatching, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

At the sound of her scream, her mom appeared looking frenzied and holding another of those diamond knives — seriously, what was _up_ with those things — as she scanned for the danger to her baby. Seeing the masked man, her entire body went rigid, and the overwhelming fear from that night flitted briefly across her face before her expression settled into an impressive impression of a still lake. Privately, Alice thought this horrible blankness was even worse than the fear. As she tucked the knife back into the kangaroo pocket of her apron, Alice noticed with keen eyes that her mother’s hands were faintly trembling. 

Her mother shakily opened the window for the man and at a few words from him she was already bundling up Alice and heading for the door faster than Alice could say, well, anything. She was a two and a half month old baby. She didn't really have a comprehensive grasp on language yet.

She moved quickly and with long strides down side streets and alley, clearly going through some sort of shortcut to get to their destination. Alice could tell from the tight way that her mother gripped her that something was definitely going on, and Alice really hoped her mom wasn’t going to go fight the yakuza to avenge her husband. Alice could totally respect the avenging part, just not the whole... _fighting the scary Japanese mafia_ bit. If she was already going to lose one parent to the whims of the yakuza, she really didn’t want to lose _both_ of them. As her mother speed walked to their destination, Alice realized that this was actually the first time she had been outside since they brought her home after she had been born. (And boy oh boy was that still her number one in the top ten supremely horrible memories her new life had given her so far. Number two was her dad getting yakuza-snatched.)

The city — town? — they lived in was rather nice, and didn’t smell like pollution like the major city Alice had grown up in had smelled like nothing but rotten garbage and diesel fumes. The air here was fresh and crisp, and she liked the feeling of the fresh air in her lungs even though the sun beating down from the sky was brutally hot even for supposed summer.

As they traversed the decidedly maze-like streets and side alleys, Alice started to get an acute sense of deja vu. There was a memory of sorts in the very back corners of her mind that was just _waiting_ to be remembered. The winding streets were so familiar in certain places, and she could _swear_ that she had seen that shop that was selling the squishy and brightly colored dumplings before somewhere. Even the older storefronts looked achingly familiar, like the flower shop they passed that was positively bursting with colorful flora out the wazoo.

She keenly wished she could read as they sped past the marketplace, because the itch of nostalgia needed to be scratched the way that one mosquito bite you can’t quite reach needs to be scratched by then and it was _deeply_ annoying. It kind of felt like building a convoluted picture puzzle, and Alice was sure she had all the edge pieces of this weird memory-mystery clicked together, but without those key center pieces she had no idea what was really going on.

The weird deja vu immediately slipped from her mind when they finally reached their destination and went inside though.

A hospital.

They had gone to the hospital. As far as she knew there was nothing wrong with her or her mom, so why were they at a hospital? The hospital didn’t seem like a place the yakuza would hang out either, so why were they _here_?

_Why did she have a bad feeling about this?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m currently writing this fic for Camp NaNoWriMo this year, because quarantine is really out to get me down. I wanted to revisit one of my all-time favorite fandoms, and try a trope that I’ve always enjoyed. I want to say here that the protagonist will NOT be any kind of Mary Sue, and just like real human people she will be a faulty character. She will also not perfectly remember the series down to every detail, she’s going to remember the stuff that was important to her, so please don’t yell in the comments about how she “should’ve remembered such-and-such”. 
> 
> The protagonist is based pretty heavily on me, but she’s not a true “self-insert”. She is a created character with her own backstory, some elements of her life are just similar to mine because I write better about things I know well. I hope you guys enjoy, expect chapter 2 to come within the next week or so! :)
> 
> \- Meadows
> 
> Edit (7/14/20): I didn’t realize until now that the version I posted before wasn’t the version my beta overlooked so there were a bunch of errors. The version you have just read now is the good version. Sorry for the inconvenience!


	2. The Revelation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Alice finally realizes what’s going on, learns a bit about her chakra, and hatches a master plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My beta is the amazing and talented @bloodredpomegranate, who singlehandedly keeps this fic from crumbling into nonsense babble.
> 
> \- Meadows

From her position bundled up in her mom’s arms, Alice couldn’t see much of the waiting room while her mom spoke in quick and hushed words to the tired woman at the main desk. All she could see from her limited vantage point was a few men and women who were wearing green vests and seemed to be bleeding _profusely_ from various different kinds of violent wounds. One woman with dark hair and darker eyes she could see beyond her mom’s shoulder had a sword stuck through the meat of her leg, but she looked completely calm and even somewhat _bored_ with the situation.

 _Scratch that_ , she thought, watching the woman’s expression tighten minutely as she shifted her stance to favor the uninjured leg, _she’s just really good at hiding the fact that it probably hurts a_ lot _._

As Alice peered around her mother’s arms, her throat felt dry as an idea started to come to her. A tiny voice in her head told her that this wasn’t normal at all for a hospital waiting room, and that she should _know why_. Normal hospital waiting rooms didn’t feature such casual violent injuries going untreated and without concern unless there was a total overload of violently injured patients.

Again, the thought was fully dropped from her mind when her mom started moving again, walking quickly towards the stairs sitting behind the thick yellow line on the floor that divided the waiting room from the main hospital. They passed doctors and the occasional nurse in the halls, but Alice wasn’t paying too much attention to them as she tried to get a look at her mom’s face to gauge how much _she_ should be worrying. The answer she got was: very much. There wasn’t a lot to see from her angle, but she could tell her mom was extremely worried from the tense muscles she could feel in the arms holding her. Then, as they broke through another corridor and turned into an open room, she could finally see what had her mom so distressed. 

It was her dad.

He was lying down in a hospital bed with a handful of those diamond knives lying innocently in a bloody tray next to him on the sheets. Two other men were sitting at his bedside, one with a big gray dog resting its head on his thighs and the other with an eyepatch over his right eye. The two men looked worse for wear and bone-tired, but at the sight of her mom they both stood up and started talking at her in rushed words, overlapping each other as they spoke in the way that only close friends or siblings did. Alice couldn’t make out what they were saying from how fast they were talking, but she took the time to stare at them instead as the center pieces of the puzzle that was the past few weeks started to snap into place.

_Green vests with little red swirls sewed on the back—_

_Knives shaped like diamonds and covered in blood—_

_The man with the painted white mask at the window—_

_The number of violent injuries in the hospital waiting room—_

Her eyes suddenly drifted to her dad, who was looking at her mom and her with a smile that revealed both his tired relief and deep love for the both of them if the soft curve of his upturned lips were anything to go by. The very last piece of the puzzle clicked satisfyingly into place as she looked at him in horror.

_A blue strip of cloth with a metal plate attached, the stylized image of a leaf engraved proudly on the scuffed but well-loved surface._

A leaf. Kunai. ANBU. Shinobi. She recognized all of these things. She was absolutely sure by now that the place she currently lived was none other than The Village Hidden in the Leaves: Konohagakure. So many different small things made sense now.

Her dad’s orange but apparently natural hair, the reason he left a newborn baby and his wife for weeks on end, the way her parents had reacted to the ANBU the night her dad left, and a dozen other things fell neatly into place and she felt a little stricken over the fact that she hadn’t seen it before. This really was the world she had obsessed over into late hours of the night, written and read fanfiction about, and even comprehensively timelined back in the time before her death. Distantly, Alice was aware that she was staring at her dad and hyperventilating, but she couldn’t stop the massive rush of feelings and thoughts hurtling and swirling around in her head at the moment. 

There were panicked voices and she could hear her dad’s deep rumble through them all, speaking words that had the two men at his bedside rushing out of the room as her mother tried to rock her gently and rub her back in soothing circles. She focused on the feeling of a large hand on her tiny back and let it ground her as she forcefully pushed all thoughts of ninja and Naruto aside and filed them away for Another Day’s Consideration. 

She slowly but surely fell into a more natural breathing rhythm, comforted by the feeling of her mom behind her. It was nice; it was warm. Her slight panic attack left her feeling tired and weak, and she really just wanted a nap, so she lifted her tiny fists and waved them weakly at her dad to be held. Her dad looked torn as he looked down at his bloody flak jacket and back at her, but her mom just laughed and held Alice out to him with a few melodic words. He took her in slightly bloody arms — definitely getting her nice baby dress ruined and warranting another bath when she got home — and held her close to his chest with a big smile that reached from ear to ear in its honest joy.

It was at this point that the two men from before bustled back in with a nurse, but at the sight of Alice being held by her dad they lost the panic in their eyes and relaxed. The nurse came forward and held up glowing green hands to her, however, making her shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have _another_ panic attack at this display of chakra use. Which was wild in itself, because chakra? It’s basically magic, and if Alice could use magic, then she could do _anything_ with enough control and big enough reserves if the diagrams in the Naruto manga were to be believed. That much power was slightly mind boggling in and of itself, but she would have to learn to live with it if it was the new norm. 

* * *

Her dad was cleared to go home by the doctor that evening, the biological recovery period of being stabbed several times in the abdomen greatly decreased by the chakra wielding nurses that had come to patch up her dad’s injuries. Which was doubly wild, because a stabbing only warranted _nurses_ to treat the injuries? No fuss, no muss, no surgery.

Medical ninja were probably the only reason a shinobi world was actually sustainable enough to base the economy off of ninja villages. Without speedy recovery, there would be no ninja left, and then where would the world be? Stuck in the medieval ages, probably.

Chakra was interesting, though.

It was nighttime again, and Alice was stuck in her crib as she mulled over what she remembered about chakra from Before. As far as she was aware, it was kind of like blood, in the way that her body couldn’t survive without a minimum level of it present in her system, which explained chakra exhaustion.

_I mean, people who just suddenly run out of blood have to sit around in the hospital with transfusions until they replenish blood on their own, so why would chakra be any different?_

If she was going to run any chakra experiments in the future, she would have to be careful about keeping a watchful eye on her supply. The first step then would just be to find her chakra. If she could find it, she could watch it, and then she could study it.

It wasn’t as hard to find her chakra as she thought it would have been, the constant low level of buzzing in her skin helping her pinpoint the exact origins of the energy. Finding it wasn’t the issue. Being constantly _aware_ of it _was._

When she was aware of her chakra, the feeling of it flowing through her was uncomfortable. It was like suddenly being aware of an extra organ, or realizing that your tongue didn’t quite fit in your mouth. Now that she had felt it, Alice wondered how she could have ever missed it. It was like she was touching a very weak live wire, minimal electricity traveling through and exploring her musculature. She could feel the restlessly buzzing energy pool at certain places before it moved on, collecting in her chest and joints before trickling in a circular motion back to where it started.

The way the chakra in her body itched and squirmed made her wonder if there was a period that babies from this universe go through like teething, but with chakra. It was uncomfortable; it ached. She felt sore and cranky, and she just wanted to rewind time to back before she went looking for her own chakra.

She was constantly aware of it after that, spending her days getting more and more annoyed as the energy grew stronger and stronger. At points it felt so strong that it was a wonder her few wisps of hair weren’t standing on end. She wondered how her parents couldn’t see the low level discomfort she was undergoing daily. Eventually this annoyance evolved into true irritation, and she cried more and more in frustration as she wished for a way to just...turn it off. 

It was when she was three months old that Alice accidentally figured out how to relieve the buzzing under her skin. It was nighttime, as most of her recent major life events seemed to unanimously agree was the prime time for discovery, and it was a day where her chakra was being Annoying and Persistent.

As she lay in her crib, unable to just _go to sleep_ , she had a sudden thought. She remembered another time where her skin had been buzzing with energy and she had lain awake, stuck staring at the ceiling as she waited for it to subside.

_It was the night after Alice’s high school graduation, and she was looking up at the glow in the dark stars that had been re-glued to the ceiling several times in the many years she’d had them. The glow was weak now, but there was no point in swapping them out for fresh ones since she’d be moving into her college dorms in August. Her childhood bedroom seemed ancient now, the faded green wallpaper matching the books on her bookshelf for wear and tear._

_This room made her feel_ old.

_She was eighteen now, much too “mature” for childish things such as glow-in-the-dark stickers and fairy stories, yet she still couldn’t help but feel so young. People expected things of her now, expected her to go to college, to study hard, get a proper job aside from neighborhood dog-sitting. She was supposed to figure out how to pay taxes and take out a mortgage and other adult things, but it all felt too soon, too soon._

_Her skin buzzed with anxious energy, and her mind whirled with too many thoughts again, all of them talking over each other and aiming to be the loudest voice in her head._ That’s another thing _, she realized, looking over at her dresser and knowing she wouldn’t find the pill bottle she needed there._ I’ll have to call the doctor on my own now to get my prescription.

_Sighing deeply, she turned her face back up to the faint galaxy on her ceiling. Alice didn’t want to walk out of her room to the bathroom to get her pills. She knew without having to look at a clock that it was much too late for her to still be awake. Her door had always creaked too loudly, she knew her mother would hear it if she tried to sneak out of her room._

_Her limbs felt heavy as she forced them to move, sitting up in her bed and swinging her legs out above her carpeted floor. She gave herself a moment to get used to the odd texture of the old carpet before she stood up, and took to trudging a circle around the center of her room. With each step, the buzzing energy in her limbs subsided a little bit, and her brain felt a little less clogged with spinning wheels._

Yes, Alice could remember many moments like that from Before, when she would pace in the night to rid herself of the excess energy when she forgot to take her medication. Maybe the same idea would work now! When she compared the way the two sensations felt (the Now buzz and the Before buzz), she could tell they were almost the same. One was just a little more physical than the other, and not a result of her brain chemistry.

Alice knew her baby legs didn’t have any muscle yet, so she wouldn’t be able to walk and therefore _pace_ right away, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get started on leg stretches so she could pace _later_.

Now was a marvelous time to start, if any.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! Here’s the second chapter you’ve all been waiting for! I have some good news for you guys as well!
> 
> Since I’m writing 25k of DIBOFA during the month of July for Camp NaNoWriMo, at least up to chapter 6 or 7 will be prewritten stuff. I’d like to keep a schedule for this fic so you reading it can know when exactly the next chapter will be posted. The schedule I’ve decided on is twice a month, on the 10th and 25th of every month. This may change a bit when term starts in the fall, so I’ll make sure to keep you guys updated in the notes section of each chapter.
> 
> I’ve also decided that each chapter will be around 2,000 to 3,000 words long! It’s the easiest chapter length to maintain, so chapters may get split up into parts if the word count veers wildly off of that estimate. If that happens though, I’ll probably post all the parts one the same day so you don’t have to wait 15 days for the conclusion to a cliff hanger.
> 
> I really hope you like this chapter, and I’m very excited for August 10th so I can post the next one. Please drop kudos or a comment if you like this fic! :)
> 
> \- Meadows


	3. Meet the Team

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our lovable protagonist hates learning vocabulary, but she’ll do it if she must. Names are finally revealed!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everybody, here’s the third chapter of this series! My beta (the beautiful and amazing @bloodredpomegranate) told me that this is one of the cutest chapters I’ve written so far, so I really hope you guys enjoy it! Remember to expect the next chapter on the 25th!
> 
> I’m not very experienced at writing about childhood, so I’m trying my best to make it seem realistic. It’s pretty difficult, but I think making something good for you guys makes it all worth it! :)
> 
> \- Meadows

Alice was about four months old when she was forced to learn six separate names in the span of one day. For better reference, she was maybe learning two new vocabulary words per week, let alone six in a _day._ Forced was such a harsh word though, implying much more demand from those around her than was strictly accurate. No, it was probably better to say she “needed” to find a way to memorize those names. She absolutely _had_ to, because she knew there was an extremely low chance of her outright hearing them again for _months._

However, Alice was blissfully ignorant of the absolute noun whirlwind that was to descend upon her when she started her day. In fact, it started almost deceivingly peacefully for the utter chaos that was to befall her later. The sun was shining brightly through the windows, birds were chirping their merry little songs, and Alice was enjoying one of the nicer mornings she’d experienced in this house as she watched her mom hum absently while she cooked a traditional breakfast of fish and rice for her sleepy husband. Things were nice; one might even call the hazy atmosphere that morning _idyllic._

Then, the first bits of Alice’s nice day started to crash down around her poor little ears.

She had started to pick up a significant bit of this archaic Japanese dialect about a week ago, finally figuring out how it equated to the Tokyo business dialect she had learned in school Before. The syllables were a little off in some words, and verbs tended to act a little strangely, but she was managing to pick up a decent amount of what her parents said as time continued to pass. Unfortunately for her, this also meant that she had to listen carefully to every conversation she was in range of for better access to new and repeated vocabulary. She couldn’t learn if she didn’t listen, after all.

This newfound proficiency in listening comprehension caused her to overhear this snippet of breakfast table conversation between her parents:

“Good morning! How are you…? You really…yesterday!” Her mom laughed teasingly.

“Don’t...........it!” Her dad replied, sounding and looking rather miserable as he cradled his head in one hand. He perked up a little when his wife started to scoop the rice out of the cooker, bright eyes twinkling as he leaned over her shoulder. “……smells delicious, Miyako! ……you, ……have…?”

Her mom laughed again, but took a pause from the frying pan to press a quick and chaste kiss to her husband’s lips even as he smiled cheekily at her. “.....you too, idiot. Remember……because you……! Now stop…my food, Ryusuke!”

Both adults missed the wide-eyed glances they got from their four-month-old, stuck in her high chair at the table. Alice found herself completely blown out of the water by the fact that she had just received not one, but _two_ important names in her life in the short span of less than a minute. Four boring months of hearing her new parents use their baby voices and refer to themselves as “Mommy” and “Daddy” to her, and _just now_ she finally learns their actual names? It was pretty wild, to say the least. To be fair though, her dad wasn’t actually at home a lot and Mom was definitely on some kind of maternity leave at the moment, so it wasn’t like there were a lot of people around for them to use their actual names with. 

Logical thinking didn’t completely get rid of her still-reeling mental state though, and she wondered why this was the time of all times for them to stop calling themselves “Mommy” and “Daddy” in her presence. Maybe the novelty of new parenthood was wearing off? Or maybe they’d just forgotten and slipped up?

 _It can’t be the first option though,_ she mused. _They can’t have gotten tired of it that fast. I remember my parents Before still calling themselves Mama and Dada around me up until around when preschool started. They probably really did just slip up. Either way though, lucky me!_

She had to take this opportunity to commit her parents’ names to memory as fast as possible so she couldn’t mix them up with any similar words later when she was listening in to their conversations. Words that spelled or pronounced themselves similarly to each other were such a _pain_ with Japanese. She still vividly remembered mixing up the word for umbrella with the word for depopulation several times Before. That probably ranked number five in the top ten most embarrassing moments of her old life, writing “depopulation” over and over on her homework and tests in complete ignorance. She wouldn’t ( _couldn’t_ ) make a similar mistake ever again. It would be especially embarrassing the second time around since Japanese was supposed to be her first language here. She doubted her new parents had ever mixed up “umbrella” and “depopulation”.

Thinking about the blatant disapproval in her teacher’s eyes at the moment that her linguistic blunder had been revealed still brought a chill down her spine every time.

Two names down. Little did poor Alice know, there were still four more to go.

The hours had passed into the afternoon and the clock in the living room had just struck three when there was a knock at the door. Alice did not know that those three loud chimes would herald the second big Name Incident of the day. If she had, she might have asked her parents not to have opened the door that day. Maybe another time, one where she wasn’t so tired from repeating her parents’ names over and over in her head. 

Alice’s parents — _Miyako and Ryusuke_ , she reminded herself — shared a look. Miyako shrugged in a way that seemed to say, “I’m not expecting anyone, are you?” Ryusuke shook his head in response, just as confused, before her mom decided to bite the social bullet and see who was at the door. A moment later, two men were barreling into the house with wild and reckless abandon. Well, one man was barreling in, and the other was politely following.

The second man seemed to be even taller than her dad — who Alice imagined was pretty tall if she compared his height to the cabinetry of the house — and his straight black hair paired with the eyepatch over his right eye gave him a rather severe appearance, despite the fact that said hair was long enough to be pulled into a bun. The man also seemed to have an acute case of RBF, which certainly wasn’t winning him any points in the “definitely a fun guy” division. He was rather pretty though, in a rough sort of way. Alice was 100% certain this guy had a fanbase a mile wide in the village purely run off of his good looks, even if his personality turned out to be trash. She’d put good money on it. Well, if she’d had any money that was. As it stood she could only hold strong suspicions and wait for them to be confirmed.

The tall man approached her dad first to talk with him, which left Alice to be positively _attacked_ by the first man who had come through the door, who she hadn’t noticed getting closer while she studied The Tall One.

If the second man was serious and looked like the perfect dictionary definition of stoic pretty boy, the first one was his exact and complete opposite. Not that he was ugly or anything, no, he certainly wasn’t ugly at all. The first man was definitely handsome, what with his mussed russet hair and strong jaw, but it wasn’t noticeable at first sight because the first thing that you saw about him was his _energy._ The man’s energy was, in a word, wild. As wild as a wild beast, with zero of the upright posture and sophisticated air around The Tall One. He had a largely feral sort of humor to his wide grin, and his posture was coiled as if he was readying to spring ferociously at the first thing that twitched wrong. 

Alice could tell from the huge gray dog at his side and the red triangular marks on his cheeks that this man was 100% Inuzuka, which explained the wildness in his presence. She suddenly found herself either lucky or supremely _unlucky_ that she was stuck in this Infuriating and Terrible High Chair at the moment, based on the fact that while she was off the ground and therefore wouldn’t be trampled by enthusiastic dog paws, but she was also stuck where she couldn’t get away from the cooing wolffish man. 

She recognized both of them from that day in the hospital where she had realized what place she was reborn into.

Glancing around (and largely ignoring the Inuzuka trying to capture her attention), she could tell from the long-suffering yet relaxed expressions her parents were making and the way these men had been at her dad’s bedside in the hospital, that there was a high chance that these two were part of her dad’s genin team or had been partnered with him long enough that it didn’t matter if they weren’t.

As she watched The Tall One speak with her parents, his eyes flitted over to her absently and their gazes locked for the briefest moment. A single black eye met her own, and that was all time she needed to deploy her most often used and most dangerous weapon. She giggled at him. She giggled, and watched in barely-hidden deep fascination as The Tall One almost literally _melted._ Gone was the natural frown of earlier, replaced by an adoring light in his eye and an upgrade to a neutral set to his mouth that Alice enjoyed immensely. The instantaneous nature of his change in expression was even faster than her dad’s was! _Now that’s something to remember,_ she thought as she dutifully ignored The Inuzuka’s jealous whine. He could have her attention later, she was dealing with The Tall One now.

The Tall One came over to her high chair, and she made demanding grabby motions with her chubby little fists. She wanted him to pick her up, to see how far she could push The Tall One from his stiff nature so far. When he didn’t immediately pick her up, looking unsure of what to do in the face of her demands, Alice made a huffy noise and frowned up at him. She had a hypothesis to test, damn it! Now was not the time for internal debates!

The Tall One half-turned to her parents with a lost look in his eye, but they too were watching this interaction with a morbid fascination. Ryusuke even had a fond tilt to his smile as he looked on at his teammate’s floundering. The trust here was tangible, and The Tall One definitely felt it if the way his face showed the briefest flash of bare hope for a moment was any indication before he turned his gaze back down to the very demanding baby calling for his attention.

Gently, so gently, he picked her up into his arms and actually _smiled_ down at her, catching her unawares. It took a long blink and a pause before she found herself freed from that smile, answering with a gummy one of her own. His smile was dangerous, in the way that a lonely child’s smile was. It showed too much of his heart all at once, and caught whoever looked upon it incredibly off guard with the naked honesty in his joy. At least she knew for the future. From the sputtering of The Inuzuka, Alice gathered that this was a rare occurrence, and committed the wholesome event to memory. If that was the case, she was definitely making it her goal to make this man smile more whenever she could.

Then, the mind-boggling part happened.

The Tall One, still smiling that wholesome smile, poked her cheek with a finger and cooed, _actually cooed,_ “Hello, Aiko-chan. I’m Yuuta, ...dad’s friend. ….you….cutest?”

Which... _what?_

Another double name drop! And her own name in the mix, to boot! Round eyed, Alice — _Aiko_ — blinked dumbfoundedly up at Yuuta. _How am I going to remember all these names? Miyako, Ryusuke, Aiko, and now Yuuta? That’s too many!_ Balefully, she looked at The Inuzuka, dreading his own personal name reveal. He grinned back, completely missing the point of her look and simply rejoicing that she was finally acknowledging him. It was awful. If he had a tail, it would be wagging right now, she was sure of it.

His general attitude gave her an idea though. A way to draw out his name, even if she’d rather not have to deal with it right now. She might as well hear them all in one go and sort it out later rather than waiting a few months to hear it again. Her plan was clever, it was brilliant. (It was very, _very_ stupid and remembering this moment later would make her cringe at her own foolishness. She hated people thrusting their expectations on her, this wasn’t going to help her any.)

Locking her eyes with The Inuzuka, she twisted her arm and pointed her pudgy finger at where she could vaguely see Yuuta’s face in her peripheral vision. Not looking away from those wild honey eyes for a single moment, she opened her mouth and very clearly attempted to say, “Yuuta.”

What _actually_ came out, because of her untrained and relatively unrefined vocal chords, was, “Yuu” and some following gurgling noises. It was enough though, and the entire room just _stopped_ for a moment. The Inuzuka’s eyes were huge and his mouth was gaping open as he stared at her. She could practically _feel_ the way the whole room was staring at her in a similar manner.

Yuuta seemed to be holding his breath. She dared not look at him in case he was smiling an even _more_ dangerous smile. Aiko didn’t think she could handle him beaming at her, and it was a very real possibility at the moment.

It might not have been a true first word, but after another heartbeat of shocked silence the room erupted into chaos. The Inuzuka seemed to be stricken that Aiko had said Yuuta’s name first, and Yuuta himself was looking at her with the widest eye she had ever seen as her mom pulled her from his arms and hugged Aiko close to her chest. Ryusuke seemed to be torn between throttling Yuuta for getting his kid’s precious first word to be “Yuuta” instead of “Dad”, and so very proud that his daughter had said her first word. No one seemed to mind that she hadn’t even finished the word, just that she had tried.

It was chaos.

* * *

Once everything had calmed down, The Inuzuka started to try his hand at getting Aiko to say his name as well. He seemed to have this weird rivalry thing going on with Yuuta from what she could tell, and kept pointing to himself and cooing out some syllables that didn’t make any sense to her because he was speaking to her in a _baby voice._

_How am I supposed to say your name if you don’t say it properly in the first place? I can't read your mind, idiot!_ Needless to say, it wasn’t going very well. At least her plan had worked somewhat.

She _was_ making an effort, though, because she was going to learn the names of her dad’s genin teammates even if it kill— ...Even if it was going to be as difficult in the future as this Inuzuka Idiot was making it right now. As far as she could tell from the multiple times he’d had to repeat it while she stared at him blankly, it was either “Koji” or “Kouki”. That last syllable was a real doozy to pin down. Oddly enough, Koji-maybe-Kouki’s ninken had a much easier name to learn than The Inuzuka Idiot himself. The big gray hound was named Shun, and instantly Aiko found that she loved him more than life itself. 

Petting the gruff ninja dog was much more rewarding than listening to the same name being repeated over and over until she felt bored to tears. Burying her chubby face in the soft fur, Aiko tuned out the chatter of the adults as she thought back on the day. It was a nice day, all things considering. She could tell that her dad’s genin teammates were good people, even if The Inuzuka Idiot was perhaps the most draining person she’d known in both lives. Yuuta at least seemed like company she would grow to enjoy as she got older. He seemed like the type to not mind a comfortable silence.

Her fingers grew slack in Shun’s fur as she yawned suddenly, feeling the effects of the day start to catch up with her.

 _I wonder when this body of mine will get a little stronger,_ she mused silently as her eyes started to drift shut. _It sure would be nice to be able to stay awake for more than a few hours on my own._

The voices of her mother and father filtered into her sleepy brain, faintly saying something to Yuuta and The Inuzuka Idiot, but she was unable to catch it before she was completely adrift in the world of dreams.

* * *

It was the middle of the night when she awoke with a start, the feeling of a heavy weight filling her chest and the grasping tendrils of panic holding her tight still fresh in her memories. Aiko took in lungfuls of air desperately, as if trying to convince herself that she still could. There was a spinning mobile of glass stars high above her head, and the light in her peripheral vision was not that of high beams refracted through water but that of a moon through her nursery window. She was small, not big, and her nightmare faded away quickly as these realizations grounded her in the here and now.

She had clearly been asleep longer than a few hours if it was already nighttime, however. 

_I’ve been wasting precious time._

Leveraging herself up into a sitting position, she used the bars of her crib to fully stand on mildly wobbly legs. It had only been a month and a half since she had begun vigorously training her legs, and she had surpassed crawling a few weeks ago. Now, she was working on standing upright with and without support.

Aiko’s chubby fists gripped the bars holding her up like a lifeline, eyes intense as she stared down at her small feet and willed herself to let go. 

_I can do it. I can stand up…_

One fist fell to her side, and Aiko swayed dangerously for a moment, but she remained standing tall for her small stature as it quickly passed.

_Under my own power!_

Both fists were clenched by Aiko’s sides now, and a tremulous grin gleamed in the low light of the room as two little legs held her up of their own accord, knees threatening to buckle at any moment but staying strong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First things first, I hope you guys liked the chapter! Please leave a comment or kudos if you did, audience response means the world to me! :)
> 
> Second things second, that story about mixing up the word for umbrella and depopulation was 100% fact by the way. In my freshman year of high school I mixed up “かさ(kasa)” with “かそ(kaso)” for the longest time, and my teacher was immensely Not Pleased with that. She’s a native speaker, so little mistakes were kind of unfathomable to her. I fixed my mistake eventually, but one never really forgets getting chewed out by their little old foreign language teacher.
> 
> Also, points to whoever recognizes Yuuta’s given characteristics! He’s definitely pretty recognizable if you know what you’re looking for and can put it all together. He’s also related to a major character later on in the story, I wonder if any of you can figure out who! ;)
> 
> \- Meadows


	4. Unexpected Issues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Aiko thinks about the world and reminisces about the past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A thousand thanks to my amazing beta, @bloodredpomegranate! I love her so, so much. Without her help I wouldn’t be having a cohesive story to present to you guys.
> 
> \- Meadows

A few weeks had passed, with Yuuta and the idiot she now knew as Koji Inuzuka becoming constant factors in her life. From what she could gather by eavesdropping on conversations the two had with her parents, they had “just gotten home” when they stopped by on that first day. Cross-referenced with the fact that they seemed to be at least chuunin level (going by the green flak vests hanging by the door that she _knew_ genin didn’t get to wear), Aiko assumed they had been off on some sort of long-term mission in the space between her dad’s hospitalization and The Name Day.

With Koji and Yuuta stopping by often, Aiko’s vocabulary-learning pool grew two hundred percent, making it easier for her to pick up and follow along with most sentences as she listened in on the various conversations between those two and her parents. Some words she had to guess on, since there wasn’t much context besides Aiko’s basic knowledge of the world and clues given within the sentences themselves, but she was pretty proud to say that she was consistently comprehending 80% of conversations. Not bad, considering it had only been a few months since she started paying attention to the words her parents said in the first place.

Over the weeks, Aiko started to learn more about the state of the world she had been born into from the adults, thanking the stars that she hadn’t had much trouble memorizing some of the more esoteric Ninja Vocabulary when she was watching the show Before. From what she had gathered they were currently fighting a war, but that tidbit wasn’t of much use since it was already obvious from the way the townsfolk moved day-to-day. From what she could see from her small view of the kitchen window, everyone walked briskly and with purpose, and the number of ninja in the village was rather low for what she knew of the general shinobi population of Konoha. What _was_ useful, however, was learning from context clues that the current Hokage was the Sandaime.

 _That puts me in either the Second or the Third Shinobi World War, which isn’t great. Genin corps survival rates were at an all-time-low during both wars_ , she’d recalled. _If I don’t learn and adapt quickly, I might not make it through to the other side._

Her parents seemed to be doing okay though, considering the difficulty of supporting a kid during wartime. Ryusuke had announced one day that he had been given leave for a few weeks to spend at home with his family, which prompted Miyako to pick her job back up. Aiko’s mother had returned to work fairly recently, after her submitted request to be removed from maternity leave was approved.

Aiko doubted that “family time” was the real reason her father was given leave, but she had neither the wish nor the vocabulary skills to question it. She just enjoyed more time with her dad, even if him doing so meant less time with Miyako. After going back to work, Miyako was often gone for long hours of the day. More often than not, she only returned home just in time for dinner, papers tucked under her arm and an exhausted look on her face. Aiko’s dad took care of her during the day, but as she curled up in her crib each night, she wondered anxiously how much longer his off-time would last. It was war, after all.

The answer to her question came sooner than she’d have liked in the form of Idiot Koji himself.

The normally cheery brunette was wearing an uncharacteristically grim expression when he came knocking at their door one evening. Miyako had just returned home half an hour prior, feeding Aiko before almost immediately falling asleep, which left the small girl cradled in her dad’s arms to hear the bad news as Koji delivered it.

“I’m sorry Ryusuke, you gotta be ready by dawn. Hokage’s orders.”

Ryusuke straightened up from his relaxed slouch, frowning as he scanned his friend’s apologetic face. “I’m still on leave. Hokage-sama promised I wouldn’t be sent out again until next Friday.”

Koji winced, and looked down at the floorboards, unwilling or unable to meet his friend’s eyes. “I know,” he replied, tone soft. “I’m sorry, I know you wanted more time with Miyako and Aiko-chan. You’re the best sealing expert we’ve got left though. Arashi and his crew already got shipped out to Rivers last month, and we just got word that Iwa’s comin’ in from the North.” His eyes flickered back up to meet Ryusuke’s, the set of his mouth a serious slash. “We need you, man.”

Her dad shut his eyes tightly for a long moment.

“I’ll be ready by dawn. Which gate?”

“East.”

Then Koji was gone in a puff of smoke, and it was just Ryusuke left standing by the door with Aiko clutched a little too tightly in his arms. She didn’t know what to think. Her dad hadn’t been sent on any long-term missions since her birth, but from the way Koji had spoken so contritely it seemed like this was going to be one.

Suddenly, Aiko’s situation in this world seemed very, very real. Her parents were soldiers in a world where war was rampant and casualty rates racked up almost faster than fresh blood could be turned out, and she was likely going to be a soldier too. Aiko didn’t hold any delusions that she could just opt out of the Ninja Academy when she became the right age for enrollment, especially in wartime. For all that Konoha was objectively the kindest and most child-protective of the ninja villages, it was still a militarily run village that focused prominently on creating good shinobi. Aiko had _two_ of those good shinobi for parents, so of course she would be expected to become one herself and fight in Konoha’s battles. She would be expected to gladly give her life for her village, and Aiko didn’t know if she even had the _capacity_ to do such.

Living to see another day was too precious to her now that she knew what comes after death. To be reborn _again_ , especially with shinobi life expectancy as terribly short as it was? It sounded too terrible to even think of.

Aiko could vividly remember what war was like Before, could remember with perfect clarity what it felt like to have a parent go to a battlefield and be unsure of if they would come home safe and sound. If they would even bother to send the body back for you to bury. Those were wars with guns and gases and atom bombs, and these were wars with chakra and kunai and terrible ninjutsu. She didn’t know if the lack of refined technology made her dad going to the battlefield better or far, _far_ worse.

_There are no winners in war. Especially for the families left at home, blindly waiting with bated breath for any word from their loved ones._

Aiko was worried terribly for her father, for this young man with a new family being sent off to fight without being asked what _he_ wanted. If _he_ wanted to go out and fight for the village without any guarantee of survival. Having to be told of his immediate deployment from a close friend, and having to move out before the sun had even risen on his home. Aiko was almost thankful she couldn’t speak, and didn’t even know if she knew the words that could make this kind of hurt any better if she could. 

The best she could do was grab a nearby thumb and squeeze it tightly, trying to send her worries and her support and her _love_ for this man all through one gesture, the best version of a hug she could give him at this size and from her position cradled in his arms. Her dad looked down at her with a heartbreakingly bittersweet smile, and pulled her in to his shoulder for a big hug of his own. 

“I’m sorry, Ai-chan. Daddy’s gonna have to go work for a while. I’ll try my best to come home when I’m done. Daddy loves you,” He murmured softly into her thickening hair as he pressed a big kiss to the top of her head.

She noted that he had said ‘I’ll try my best’ as opposed to ‘I promise’.

* * *

As ordered, Ryusuke left for his mission by dawn. He had said his goodbyes to Miyako, sharing a tight hug with his teary wife, and kissed the top of Aiko’s head one last time before stepping out the door. Aiko wouldn’t stop thinking about that last gentle scratch of his horrible goatee on her forehead for days, worrying over if it would be the last memory she had of this father, similar to her father Before.

Ryusuke’s departure had left her mom with only a few hours to find a babysitter for Aiko before her shift at work (wherever it was she was working) started at 6 am. This meant that Aiko woke up in the morning unaware of the fact that she would be fed and cared for by a most unlikely face that day.

As she sucked down milk from her neon green sippy cup — her breakfast these days, courtesy of her mom, the cup being a gift from Koji — Aiko stared at the man sitting across the table from her. Apparently your husband’s genin teammates are excellent last-minute babysitting fodder, because Aiko was currently alone in the house with Yuuta himself, having been called in to babysit her by her mom when no other candidates could be found.

While Aiko loved the tall man very much and would normally rejoice that he was coming over, she didn’t know how she felt about putting her fate in his hands. Maybe if she was a few years older it wouldn’t be a problem, but babies were biologically extremely accident prone and Yuuta already looked like he was on the edge of a breakdown after just waking her up and feeding her.

_God forbid this poor man has to change a diaper. That’ll just be uncomfortable and stressful for the both of us. How long is he supposed to be staying again?_

* * *

Okay, so Yuuta wasn’t a _terrible_ babysitter, but he wasn’t a gold medal caretaker either. So far, she’d had to scream at him to get the poor man to realize she needed him to change her diaper ( _just as awful as predicted_ ), and she hated the way he held her while she had to be burped. It made her feel like some sort of slug with the way he hesitantly patted her back during the process. She could tell he’d never really dealt with a baby before, so she couldn’t get too mad at him. If she hadn’t been reborn into the body of one, she was sure she’d have no idea how to properly burp a baby either.

It didn’t make it any less gross when she threw up the first few times. He’d learned pretty quickly after that.

A whole three weeks went by with Yuuta watching her during the day, and gingerly handing her off to her mom at night. Due to the many naps she was taking while Yuuta was over to lessen the man’s anxiety, Aiko found herself with a lot of free time in her crib at night while Miyako was out cold after returning from her shift. Of course, she used that time to further her self-prescribed exercise plan. It wasn’t too hard to figure out the locking mechanism on the bars of her crib, and as long as she was quiet Miyako didn’t stir even the slightest bit while she stumbled and fumbled around the house at night.

Aiko’s legs were getting stronger by the day, and her refined motor control was improving rapidly as she made it her job to grab, lift, and put down as many items as she could find within reach. Granted, neither Yuuta nor her mom left many things out and about where a baby could get them, but that didn’t stop her from trying her hardest to grab things anyway. Her biggest success so far was picking up a bowl that had fallen to the floor one night. She’d made sure to put it back exactly as she found it (she did live in a house full of ninja, after all), but she was extremely proud of the growing strength in her arms.

It was on the fourth weekend after her dad had left (she knew because it meant Miyako stayed home for two days and Aiko wasn’t subjected to Yuuta’s frankly terrible childcare), when she was finally caught in the act.

All she’d wanted this time was a pencil. No fancy dish-grabbing, no couch climbing. Just a pencil, the one Yuuta had left on the low table in the living room yesterday afternoon. She’d only wanted a pencil so she could move on to re-learning the fine motor control associated with writing.

Aiko had had one hand on the pencil, the other clutching the edge of the table for support, when the front door had opened and she was blasted with direct moonlight from the street outside. Both Aiko and the silhouette at the door had frozen in their tracks, neither expecting to see the other there, especially at the late hour of the night. The clock on the wall, Aiko had noticed earlier, displayed a quarter to midnight. When her wide eyes turned up from the figure's feet to see the face of the person that had caught her with her hand in the metaphorical cookie jar, she did not expect to see Ryusuke looking back at her in obvious confusion.

For a moment that seemed completely displaced from time, she just stood there and drank up his image. He looked a little worse for wear, bags sitting heavy under his tired blue eyes, but ultimately not seriously injured. There was mud caked on his boots and old blood stains were spattered across his vest ( _arterial_ , she noticed, _probably someone else’s_ ), and even his goatee looked a little singed. His tense shoulders faded away as they both took the sight of each other in, and the warm smile that spread across his face broke her trance.

Aiko’s palms felt clammy with nerves as she slowly inched her hand away from the pencil and tried her best to look the part of the innocent baby who Definitely Could Not Walk. It didn’t work very well, if the eyebrow raise from her dad was any judge. After another long moment of silence, it seemed like he’d decided to just ignore it for now in favor of hurriedly tossing his sandals off and scooping her up to his dusty flak jacket with his big arms. He pressed scratchy kisses all over her face, and she almost cried from the feeling. God how she missed his stupid, horrible Goatee Kisses.

Aiko clutched the fabric within her short reach as tightly as she could, to assure herself that this dirty but _alive_ figure of her father was real. He was real, and he was _home._ As she breathed in the smell of sweat and a faint tinge of iron ( _the blood_ ) from his dusty vest, and let it soothe her anxieties away, she almost missed the four words that were fiercely whispered into her hair. But not quite.

“I missed you, kiddo.”

Aiko really started crying now, from sheer relief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so here’s that fresh new chapter you guys were waiting for! It’s not very long, but that’s going to be a little bit of a theme in chapters until we hit the main plot line. Don’t worry, there’s only a few more updates before that happens, so you’ll get to read longer chapters in maybe a month or two.
> 
> Yuuta made another appearance! He’s very awkward with small children as you can tell. Anyone have any guesses yet as to which major character he’ll be related to?
> 
> \- Meadows


	5. Bonding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our protagonist, Aiko, discovers that she has been rather cold to this new family of hers. She’s trying her best, but it can be difficult.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hola, it’s that time again! Here’s a fresh chapter for you all, and thank you guys so much for 140 kudos! That’s so wild! 140 people enjoy my writing, that blows my mind! Anyway, I hope you guys like this update! :)
> 
> Thanks to my superb beta, @bloodredpomegranate, for making this chapter possible. You think I’m kidding, but I genuinely couldn’t do this without her.
> 
> \- Meadows

Ryusuke didn’t keep the secret of Aiko’s ability to walk for long, of course. By for long, she really meant at _all._ By the time the unsuspecting girl had been woken up the next morning for breakfast, Miyako had absolutely refused to pick her up in the slightest and made Aiko walk to the kitchen table herself. It was awful, those raised eyebrows and crossed arms as her mother just watched her make the trek alone. The woman only finally lifted her daughter up to settle her immediately in The Horrible High Chair, shaking her head and sighing very deeply.

 _Betrayal. I have been betrayed by my own mother_ , Aiko thought morosely, eyes stuck to the white ceiling to avoid her parents’ eyes for as long as possible.

Needless to say, Aiko was Not Pleased about her father spilling the metaphorical beans to Miyako. The nonchalant man had robbed her of her most comfortable means of transport via her mother’s warm embrace. Aiko glared balefully across the table at him with the biggest frown of both of her lives, but all she got in return was a smile and a, “Cute.”

Curse her baby cheeks.

Miyako laughed at her family’s antics, and cut the egg on her plate in half with chopsticks. “That she is, dear. She definitely takes after you in personality though.” Her soft brown eyes crinkled at the corners in amusement as she spared a mirthful look for her daughter. “I can’t imagine _I_ would be the one who she learned to get up to sneaky mischief from.”

Ryusuke exaggeratedly gasped, clutching his chest as he looked at his wife with a scandalized expression (though his eye twinkled with humor). “The audacity! My own wife, against me!” At Miyako’s snort, he suddenly grinned, pecking a kiss to the corner of her mouth. Cheerfully, he said, “At least our daughter will have your good looks, Miyako! Good thing she didn’t get my nose. Imagine this ugly mug on our cute daughter!” He made an exaggerated face at his wife as he added, “The horror!”

Miyako shook her head with a grin, teasingly tweaking his nose with her free hand. “I don’t know, I rather like that mug of yours. I snagged a pretty handsome man!”

When Ryusuke looked like he was going to protest at her flattery, Miyako just picked up some of his rice with her chopsticks and shoved it in his mouth with a grin before turning back to the food on her plate. Dutifully, Ryusuke chewed, rolling his eyes and trying his best to share a commiserating look with his daughter. Aiko wasn’t buying it. She rather liked his mug too, besides the whole goatee thing he had going on. She just stared back at her father for a long moment, before very pointedly going back to her sippy cup full of milk.

When dishes were being cleared after breakfast and Ryusuke stood elbow deep in the sink, Miyako spoke up from the comfortable silence they had all fallen into. After she had finished ferrying dishes to her husband, she grabbed her bag of miscellaneous papers off of the low table in the living room. Proceeding to snatch her flak vest from the coat hook and donning it with a speed only ninja could claim, Aiko’s mom briefly poked her head back into the kitchen and asked, “Hey dear, can you watch Aiko-chan today? I know you’re probably tired, but Yuuta’s off in Grass somewhere as of last night and Koji said he was supervising some sort of clan class today, so I don’t have a babysitter set up.”

Ryusuke looked up from the dishes and blinked at his wife.

“Yeah, of course I can watch her. I assumed I would be anyway, since I’m not really up for another mission just yet,” he said.

Miyako smiled and came over to the sink to give her husband a chaste goodbye kiss, saying, “Thanks Ryu! If you get the chance and you have the energy, take her for a walk outside or something. Ayu-chan in Accounting made a point that it’s not good for Aiko-chan to stay cooped up inside all the time. Love you!” She stepped outside, and was gone quickly into the crowd. Ryusuke stared out the kitchen window, watching Miyako disappear, and the kitchen was still for a second. Silence seeped in to every corner of the room, and Aiko started to get the feeling something was wrong.

Her father hadn’t looked at her yet.

When he turned back to the mug in his sudsy hands, his posture was too loose for the growing tension in the room — itching at Aiko terribly and making her blink a few times when her eyes started to dry out from how intensely she was watching Ryusuke’s back — as he said lightly, “I wonder how long you’ve been able to walk, Ai-chan. I asked her, and Mommy said neither she nor Yuuta has even seen you crawl yet.”

Her breath was caught in her chest for a moment, still as she held it in growing dread for his next words.

Her father’s eyes flicked back at her for the briefest moment, and what she could catch of his current expression was completely unreadable beyond a slight pulling of his eyebrows together. “I wonder when you’ve been finding the time to hide it from them.”

Aiko felt cold.

 _Is this it? Is this the moment where he figures out that I’m too smart? That his real child shouldn’t be_ this _aware? Am I going to be sent off to T &I? _

Aiko sucked in a very deep breath as quietly as she could, feeling a little like she was dying all over again.

 _No,_ she assured herself with another deep breath, _he wouldn’t do that. Not to his own kid, even if she showed mental capacity babies really shouldn’t have. It’ll be fine, I’ll be fine._

Her father’s tone was as casual as it had ever been as he continued, unaware of the turmoil rolling in Aiko’s head, “I wonder so many things about you, Ai-chan. It worries me sometimes how smart you are. You know, if your brain grows too big, then you might just get gobbled up by monsters!” He turned to her with a grin, and wiggled wet fingers at her. When Aiko just sat there, frozen in her seat and staring with big eyes at him, his hands dropped back to his sides and sighed.

Her dad’s shoulders slumped as the false energy leaked out of him, leaving him an almost deflated figure. She could read him now as clear as day, with those tired eyes locked on his soapy hands in front of him and shoulders stiff despite the clear weight he felt as displayed by his stance. 

Ryusuke was afraid. Not of her, but _for_ her.

His voice was so soft that she could barely hear it when he spoke up again, eyes still trained on his studiously still hands, “I don’t even know if you can understand any of this, but you’re my smart and amazing daughter so I want to believe you’re at least getting some of it. I just want to tell you this, and hope the meaning gets across even if you don’t know the words.” He paused for a moment, then let his hands fall to his sides as he came close to where Aiko was sitting in her high chair.

Ryusuke crouched down, looking up into her big eyes as he said with a voice saturated in honest sincerity, “Mommy and Daddy don’t want to have to miss any more of your milestones. You’re so important to us, and missing out on your life is already too easy to do without you hiding it. We love you so much, Ai-chan.”

Aiko’s gut twisted with the worst guilt, mouth feeling sour as she realized what had happened and what she had done.

Aiko hadn’t thought about how her new parents would feel when she learned how to walk without them. She hadn’t thought about the impact she had on the family she was reborn into, only about the impact she might leave on the world outside of it. She hadn’t realized that they were struggling with how they already missed so much when they were gone all the time, it hadn’t even crossed her mind that her plan to hide from prying eyes might hurt her parents as well.

The laughter from the breakfast table rang hollow now in the halls of her memory, the smiles from her mother holding a little less joy than she remembered. Maybe she wasn’t looking hard enough. She just wasn’t thinking about anyone else, and that scared her.

Miyako and Ryusuke were _human_ , they were real people with real thoughts and worries, and she hadn’t even been able to see it because she was so self-absorbed. Aiko hadn’t even truly considered them her “parents” because of how close they were in age to her Before, she’d simply acted with them as she had with her various roommates over the years. It wasn’t fair of her to deny them the growth of their first kid just because she’d stolen their real daughter’s life. It wasn’t their fault that they had gotten a college student stuck in a baby’s body instead of their actual baby.

It was her fault, if anything, for taking that from them because she couldn’t just die like normal people did.

_Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to be a little more open about my training. As long as Danzō or the Hokage don’t find out, I should be fine. I just have to trust that Miyako and Ryusuke don’t want me to join the war early either._

Ryusuke — _Dad_ , she corrected herself _—_ seemed to search whatever expression she was making for a long moment, before deciding he had found what he was looking for. His serious face melted back into an easy smile, and he kissed the top of her head affectionately.

“Well that’s alright then. Looks like you got the gist and even a little more, huh? I knew you were smart, my little Ai-chan.”

Straightening out, he smiled one last small smile at Aiko before moving back to the dishes left in the sink. Miyako — _Mom_ — would be so mad if she had to do the dishes after her shift, she was always pretty cranky when she came home until she took a nap (usually with Aiko).

* * *

Once her dad had finished up the dishes, she found herself being stuffed into a little baby carrier and strapped securely to his chest. Baffled at this sudden and surprising turn of events, she watched from her high perch as Ryusuke forwent his usual outside attire (such as his flak jacket and hitai-ate), seemingly content to just wear the nondescript shirt and trousers of his uniform. (Aiko was suspicious that he didn’t actually own any non-shinobi clothes.) He slipped on his sandals, and when he reached for the door handle it finally clicked in her brain what was happening.

They were going outside.

She hadn’t been outside since both hospital visits, which were _months_ ago. 

She tossed a glance back at the clock in the living room when Ryusuke turned to grab a little box and strap it to his hip — probably kunai going by the rectangular shape, shinobi didn’t go _anywhere_ without some sort of weapon, she had learned — and saw that it wasn’t even quite eight in the morning yet. What business did they have going outside at half past seven?

When her dad opened the door, Aiko was positively blasted with the bright rays of the sun, but before she could even blink she was now wearing a tiny brimmed hat and sunglasses. She saw from the corner of her eye Ryusuke’s hand retreating to the black baby bag she’d seen her mom give Yuuta every time he came over to babysit.

_Huh. He’s fast._

They exited the house, Aiko ferried along by her father as both of them enjoyed the feel of the fresh air in their lungs. Aiko was particularly pleased — the tension of this morning already forgotten — since she didn’t often get to breathe the air from outside beyond the opening of her nursery window every morning. The air was refreshingly cool and crisp, perfect for the fall weather she had only been able to observe from the kitchen window. 

Something that she noticed as Ryusuke traveled a path closer to the edge of town, was that Konoha was actually rather beautiful, even in its frankly odd and abstract method of structural design. The architecture, though haphazard in places, created a homey sort of feeling through the way it hugged the thin streets they traveled. Homes and shops were stacked atop each other like layers of cake (compensating for the lack of area with height), the new built upon the old built upon the even older, cataloguing the growth of the village over the years. This phenomenon only seemed to calm down a bit as they edged away from the main residential areas, and Aiko could see huge trees looming in the distance over the tops of the houses, looking to be even older than Konoha itself. 

They were ablaze with fiery colors, almost feeling like a display of pride for the very Land of Fire they grew in. Gnarly roots delved into the rich soil and wove intricately together in a wild but alluring pattern that Aiko almost couldn’t tear her wide eyes away from. Vibrant red leaves decorated the strong branches like opulent jewels do the rings of a king, and the ones whose color had started to fade like a beautiful sunset crunched softly under her dad’s naturally stealthy tread as he kept walking onwards into the tree line.

Autumn Before had never been so enchanting.

Eventually, Ryusuke stopped, and Aiko took in the place they stood now. It seemed to be a large clearing, with some craters and gashes torn into the lush grass of the clearing. There were less leaves on the ground here, and Aiko assumed it was because the area saw frequent use. In fact, if she was correct, this was a training ground. No normal clearing would have scars on the earth like the ones she was seeing, not unless it was the site of many small battles.

Suddenly, Aiko found herself being unbuckled from her dad’s chest and lowered carefully to the forest floor with firm hands. When she looked questioningly up at him, he smiled and plopped down to sit up against the tree behind him.

“Alright Ai-chan! We won’t be bothered here, so you can run around and train up your legs! I’m sure you must be excited to play in the leaves,” he said, patting her head. “Don’t worry, Daddy’s here to watch out for you if you need him.”

Aiko looked unsurely from him to the piles of leaves at the edges of the clearing. They did look very tempting.

Ryusuke nodded at her reassuringly, and she mentally shrugged before toddling off to examine the space. Her dad’s eyes watched her carefully, and she could feel his gaze on the back of her neck even when she wasn’t facing his direction. Sending him another look, she hesitantly brushed the scrutiny off and continued to inspect the area with a heavy curiosity.

* * *

A few hours later, Aiko was feeling exhausted and sore. Scurrying around on uneven dirt and leaves for an extended period of time was wildly different from sneaking around a house for half an hour late at night. Her dad had watched her the whole time, and she wasn’t sure she even wanted to know the reason he was trying to get her to scamper around in a secluded area. It was probably some sneaky ninja stuff. The whole “look beneath the underneath” shtick wasn’t her jam on a good day, so just forget it when she’s tired and cranky like she was at this moment.

Aiko was exhausted, and frankly, didn’t want to use her legs any more. 

Plopping down on her butt in the middle of a pile of leaves, she turned her face to her father and made grabby hands for him to come collect her from her leafy perch. Immediately, he got up from his position against the tree and walked over to his cranky daughter, picking her up under the arms and smiling at her with amusement.

“Had a good time, Ai-chan? You looked like you were having fun out there,” he joked, strapping her into the chest carrier. She simply tilted her head back to glare at his grinning face, her breath leaving her in a huffy noise as she dropped her chin back down and pouted. He laughed at her, and started heading down the path they came from.

“Someone’s tired. Don’t worry, Daddy’ll take you right home so you can nap,” he said as he smiled down at the baby strapped to his chest. Humming a tune under his breath, Ryusuke meandered back through the streets of their home, making his way back to the house.

That nap he was talking about sounded pretty good.

They passed a gaggle of shinobi on the way there who greeted her dad, and she zoned out as Ryusuke engaged them in small talk. When she looked out in the distance, she could see the Hokage Mountain towering above Konoha. Only three stone faces adorned the weathered cliff side at the moment, but Aiko knew that it would eventually be graced with many more to come. Minato Namikaze, Tsunade Senju, Kakashi Hatake, and even Naruto Uzumaki himself would one day be immortalized upon it, their legacy giving inspiration to many generations of ninja to come.

It would take four more Hokages until this world would know real peace, however. Four more Hokages of terrible battles and war, no matter the lack of conflict that would follow their reigns. Since she was equipped with “future knowledge”, could she change any of that? Could she in any way affect the peace of this world with what she knew?

_Can I fix things?_

So many good people died to achieve that peace, so many characters who could have grown old to do so many great things, wiped out because it made the story better. For _plot development_.

Ryusuke wrapped up his conversation with the shinobi, saying his goodbyes as Aiko considered her father. He was a good soldier, and a good soldier in a time of war was a soldier who might not come home. Aiko knew that. If she fixed things…maybe she could help assure that he lived through the wars they would face. Ryusuke was a good man, with a family, and he didn’t deserve to be fighting in wars fueled only by the greed of foreign Kages. 

No one did.

They had reached home by now while Aiko struggled with the mess of her thoughts, and the hat and sunglasses were removed from her when they stepped inside the entrance hall. Ryusuke slipped off his sandals and undid the chest carrier with impressive speed, though he still carried Aiko with him when he stepped into the kitchen. Grabbing her sippy cup, he filled it with half of the big bottle of milk she was supposed to consume today, and Aiko realized that she was hungry. She hadn’t even noticed before, too busy with first exploring the clearing and then her own thoughts to recognize the empty feeling in her stomach. Ryusuke screwed the lid back on as he topped off the neon green cup, and handed it to Aiko (who was now being cradled against his shoulder) before shuffling off down the hall that led to her parents' bedroom. 

Aiko sucked down her lukewarm drink, emptying the cup in mere moments as she cuddled up to her dad’s shoulder. When she was done, Ryusuke took the empty container from her and placed it down on his bedside table with a click of plastic against wood. The bed creaked in protest as he flopped down onto it, carefully cradling Aiko to his chest as he went so she didn’t jostle too much. She patted his now available cheek with a questioning burble, and he just smiled tiredly at her.

“Daddy’s pretty sleepy right now, Ai-chan. I figured we could take that nap together,” he said, a yawn coloring his voice as if to prove his point. It made sense that he would be pretty tired, now that Aiko thought about it. He _had_ just come back from his long-term mission last night.

Nodding back at him, she decided that _yes,_ naps were in order.

Curling her small body up to her dad’s large chest, she pressed her ear to it and let the sound of his steady heartbeat thrum through her comparatively tiny body. She counted the beats as one counts sheep, relaxing more and more as she counted higher.

_One, two, three, four…_

Aiko’s eyes started to drift shut, and a warm hand petted her short hair.

_Five, six, seven, eight…_

_Today was really nice_ , she thought, before falling completely into the gentle world of dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo... What did you guys think? I provided some familial angst and a kick in the butt for our intrepid main character, but they also bonded which is great. Leave a comment or a kudos below telling me if you liked it, or leave a comment to just talk to me! I try to answer every one if I can! :)
> 
> School’s also started back up for me, so that won’t change much for you guys until winter break, but please bear with me until then. Upload dates should stay the same, but times may be a bit wonky. Some chapters may be posted at 2 am the day of, and some may be posted at 10 pm at night. I will try my best to stay on schedule though, so please expect the next chapter on the 25th of this month! :)
> 
> \- Meadows


	6. Yellow Bone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aiko is teething, and having a Bad Time with it. Luckily, there are a few things that come around to make her feel better!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, everybody! Sorry for posting this chapter so late in the day, I’d totally forgotten to edit it until it came to posting time so that took a while. Anyway, here’s the chapter and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Special thanks to my amazing beta, @bloodredpomegranate.
> 
> \- Meadows

Aiko had started teething, and it was _awful._

She couldn’t remember the first time she had teethed, but she was unfortunately rather aware of the unpleasant ongoing sensation now. While memories of adulthood granted her such blessings as dignity and thought processes that extended beyond food and sleep, it was a double bladed sword in times like these. Before, Aiko’s roommate had been pursuing her bachelor’s in pediatrics, which meant that Aiko Now could vividly remember the x-rays of baby teeth that had been kept on the fridge during finals. Those images haunted her to this day, all those tiny mouth rocks just _stuck_ in rows up by the nose.

It was even more horrifying than the criminal forensics course she had taken freshman year, if only because forensics was objectively fascinating and baby teeth were incredibly less so.

The point was, teething hurt like a bitch, and Aiko’s gums constantly felt like they were going to explode right inside in her mouth. If she thought _being born_ was the most uncomfortable thing she had experienced, boy oh boy was this about a million times worse. At least when you’re getting born it’s not _painful_ , just odd. Having all your teeth push through sensitive gums so you can chew? _That_ was painful. Aiko had no qualms about making her displeasure crystal clear to the occupants of the house either, including any unlucky visitors who were unaware of the current state of the household.

If she had to suffer, so did they.

Much to her parents’ dismay, Aiko had taken matters concerning her growing teeth into her own devious little hands. No small object was safe from her tiny mouth, and few big objects were either. One day, Miyako had returned home after an extra long shift to Ryusuke trying to pry Aiko off of her own high chair, attempting to stop the chewing fiend from gnawing on one of the wooden legs.

It was surprisingly difficult for the baffled father in question, since Aiko had been training her grip strength for almost a full two months now. Her tiny hands held shocking power for a baby.

After finding the stash of lemons that Aiko had hidden under the pillow in her crib, Miyako was a short step away from pulling her own hair out. Ryusuke was simply trying his best to hide anything that could possibly be considered in any sort of reach of his daughter.

There were only three things that could make her momentarily forget about her teething woes. The first, lemons. Their sour taste completely negated the pain of growing mouth rocks, and peeling them was good practice for her dexterity. The second: the daily trips she took with her dad down to The Clearing, toddling about and playing in the leaves to train her small body’s muscles. It was an excellent source of exercise, and it also meant that her dad cleared time for her in the morning every single day.

Today was a little different from usual however, because when Ryusuke and Aiko found their way to the training ground, there was already someone else there. The person’s back was to them, but Aiko could tell immediately who it was.

_Tall, big shoulders, red-brown hair? Definitely Idiot Koji._

Her theory was confirmed when a deep bark echoed through the trees, and Shun came running into the clearing with the handle of a rusty katana clenched in his jaws. Paws flinging up dirt and leaves behind him, the big dog bounded forward to Koji (who still had his back to them), and dropped the eroded weapon off at the man’s feet.

Koji leaned down to pick it up, and _finally_ turned around to face them, grinning jovially at the pair as he did so. “Why hello there! I knew you two would be here,” he exclaimed excitedly.

Ryusuke unstrapped Aiko from the carrier, replying with doubt coloring his tone, “How could you have possibly known that?” As soon as the little girl’s feet touched the ground, she was waddling off at her fastest speed towards her favorite being in the whole wide world: Shun.

Shun’s tail waved eagerly at the sight of Aiko and the sizable canine came to meet her halfway, licking her face with his big tongue in a happy greeting. Shun had warmed up to her pretty early on in Koji’s visits, and she’d never felt better about it. Scratching Shun’s belly was incredibly therapeutic for the girl, flooding her brain with massive amounts of serotonin every time she did so. It didn’t hurt that the big dog seemed to be having a good time with it too.

As Aiko played with Shun, she listened in mildly to the conversation the other two humans in The Clearing were having.

“—can’t really think you could fool _my_ nose, could you? You practically reek of leaves and mud every time I come to visit!” Koji was laughing, tapping his nose with one finger. “I’m the best in the business, man! That’s like _me_ wondering how you managed to pull off a Body Grip trap. Easy peasy puppy stuff!”

Ryusuke looked properly chagrined at this, and rubbed the back of his neck as he said, “No, you have a point. Sorry Koji.” He looked over to Aiko then, who gave him a little wave from her position up against the flopped over form of Shun, quite enjoying her comfortably warm pillow. “I usually take Ai-chan out to this place so she can stretch her legs and play around a bit. She’s not quite up to running yet, but I can faithfully say she’s way ahead of her peers.”

Koji also turned his gaze to the child sprawled over his ninken with a thoughtful look. “Do you think you’ll be putting her through early enrollment in the Academy? It looks like you and Miyako are raising a genius here.” Those honey eyes flicked back to Ryusuke to watch his response.

Ryusuke’s voice was almost too quiet for Aiko to catch as he turned his face away from her, expression no longer in her line of sight as he said, “I don’t know.”

Whatever Koji saw in his expression must not have been good, because his face turned grim, and he clapped a firm hand on his friend’s shoulder. “It’ll be alright, Ryu. She’s still just a pup, you have years to figure it out.”

When her father looked back at her, she saw worry in the way he bit his lip and his eyebrows scrunched together.

“I hope so.”

* * *

The third (and last) thing that guaranteed a brief respite from the troubles of Aiko’s teeth was petting Shun’s soft gray fur whenever Koji came to visit. It was on this particular social call from the Inuzuka pair however that Aiko firmly decided that Koji was her new favorite person in the world, higher in the rankings than even Shun. Even the feeling of Shun’s fur running through her small fingers couldn’t beat Koji out, which was saying something.

The reason for this was simple: Koji had brought her a gift.

Now, this was no normal gift. No, as preceded by the neon green sippy cup she still took every meal in, Idiot Koji was practically incapable of normal gifts. Instead, he brought her something she would enjoy far more than any normal gift. Normal gifts were for chumps anyways.

He’d brought her a rubber dog bone. _Bless that man._

It went a little something like this:

Training that morning had been incredibly fruitful, especially with the addition of Koji and Shun to aid the father and daughter in their efforts. Aiko had taken to making laps of the clearing, even wandering beyond the tree line at times, with Shun trotting along right there next to her in case she needed support. It was sweet, and it also meant that she was learning how to navigate over roots and branches, which was a much bigger challenge than suspiciously deep leaf piles.

While Aiko and Shun made their laps around the tree line, Koji had decided that Ryusuke wasn’t taking proper steps to upkeep his own state of fitness, stating that “a shinobi always had to be ready”. The two had begun a series of hand-to-hand combat battles, seemingly choosing not to use weapons or jutsu due to the proximity of a small child. Probably a smart decision, considering if she was even the slightest bit grazed by anything, Aiko would probably not be having a very good time.

Her baby body was _incredibly_ and _frustratingly_ fragile.

When the four of them decided to conclude their morning of various methods of vigorous training, Ryusuke extended an invitation for the Inuzuka pair to come over for lunch. Koji and Shun heartily accepted, Shun with a series of barks and thumping tail wags while his partner did so a little more verbally but equally enthusiastically. They all returned to The House, Aiko’s dad unlocking their front door after a few attempts (dropping the keys on the ground in the process), and stepping inside out of the growing chill in the air. Winter was coming, and it was coming sooner rather than later.

Sometimes Aiko wondered what Konoha would look like, blanketed under snow. So far, all the seasons had been resplendent in their beauty, even the beating sun of the summer she remembered so clearly. The leaves on the trees had been lush and the flowers growing along the windowsills across the street had been vibrant with life, opening up to a clear blue sky that she had daydreamed into when she was in her nursery in the mornings. Aiko could imagine what the coming winter would look like, could picture the way sunlight would gleam off of crystalline snow and the air would turn cutting in its crispness. Even Before, Aiko had loved winter the most of all, had put off papers and reports just to sit at her window and watch the snow stick to the glass.

Aiko was pulled out of her imaginative reverie when her father unstrapped her from the chest carrier, setting her down on the ground. Instantly, the girl made a beeline to the living room and the warm comfort of the couch, keeping an ear open for any conversation behind her.

She couldn’t help being a little nosy, there wasn’t much to entertain her besides eavesdropping these days. The clear voice of her father was also just incredibly hard to miss.

“Come on in Koji. Shun too.” When they did so, Koji slipping off his shoes and walking into the living room (where Aiko was already snuggled into her favorite cushion on the faded green couch), Ryusuke shuffled after him saying, “So what’s the reason you were down at the training ground today? I know you don’t train there anymore, not since we were genin.”

Koji and Aiko had started an impromptu staring contest as Ryusuke spoke, neither participant willing to blink or give in even as Koji replied, “I just came to check in, Ryusuke! Shun missed little Aiko-chan too, so I thought we’d pop by Ground 4 and see what was going on.”

At this, Shun gave a protesting rumble, but still dropped his big head in Aiko’s lap to silently ask for scratches. Aiko obliged, running her chubby fingers through the hound's thick fur. Shun made a pleased, almost cat-like, rumbling noise in the back of his throat. The ninken’s eyes dropped shut, though one big green eye stayed cracked open a slit to watch over the little girl petting his head.

“C’mon Koji, you never stop by just because Shun wants to,” Ryusuke groaned, exasperated. Stretching his arms above his head, he yawned, “What’s your real motive? You always have one.”

Koji laughed at that, and finally broke the intense eye contact between himself and Aiko — _yes, I win! —_ as he turned to his long-time friend. “Yeah, you’re right. You always know, don’t you? How do you do that?” He scratched the back of his head sheepishly, chuckling out, “I’ve never been able to get away with a prank on you because of that!”

Ryusuke rolled his eyes. “No,” he corrected, as if this was an often repeated argument, “you never get me because I used to be a _traps specialist_ , you idiot. You can’t prank a master prankster, especially one who knows you as well as I do.”

Koji made a dismissive motion with his hand as if to wave the very thought away. “I prank Arashi just fine, but that’s besides the point. The reason I was there was because I noticed during my last two visits that little Aiko-chan keeps trying to chew on everything in sight, like really young pups do. I asked Mom what that’s about, and she said humans need to chew stuff up when they’re tiny too!” At this, he looked bewildered but excited, this clearly having been new information to him. “I didn’t realize that! Tsume made fun of me when I said so, but it’s okay because I know she doesn’t know as much as I do about ninken. The brat doesn’t pay attention nearly enough, and she keeps skipping the clan classes to go play with her friends. Can you believe that?” Koji seemed genuinely annoyed at this, and his hands were clenching open and shut like he wanted to shake some sense into “Tsume”.

Aiko thought back to what she remembered of the Inuzukas from Before as Ryusuke and Koji continued talking in the background. She hadn’t paid Kiba and his family much attention, but if she was correct then “Tsume” was his mom. The Inuzuka Head didn’t get a lot of screen time, but whenever she showed up the spiky-haired woman wasn’t easy to miss. Aiko wondered how Koji knew the future head of the clan.

_Maybe they’re closely related? He was calling her “brat,” so I don’t think they’re the same age. A cousin? Sister, maybe?_

When she tuned back in, it was to her father exasperatedly saying, “Yes, yes, okay. That’s a very good reason to be mad, Koji, but can we get back on topic? Why were you at the clearing today if not to train?”

Koji tried his best to look offended, but the man’s usual wild grin bled through as he responded, “I’m so hurt, Ryusuke! My own teammate doesn’t want me to come visit him and his cute daughter?”

Ryusuke rolled his eyes, and scooted Aiko’s body over a little so he could squeeze into his regular spot on the couch, avoiding sitting on either his daughter or his friend’s ninken as he went. “Of course I want you to visit, but I’m _tired._ I want to clear this up, eat lunch with you, and then go have a _nap_.”

Koji laughed, and reached into his bag as he said, “Alright, alright, I got ya. I brought a gift over for Aiko-chan, to help with her teeth!” As he said that, he finally found what he was rummaging around for and lifted it from the depths of his satchel.

It was a neon yellow (a theme in coloration from Koji’s gifts, it seemed) rubber dog bone, shiny and new and tied around the middle with a red ribbon. 

Aiko _loved_ it.

All traces of sleepiness left her, and as her dad stared in mute disbelief at the horrendously colored chew toy, Aiko extricated her small hands from Shun’s fur and reached towards Koji with excited squeals. Koji looked surprised but incredibly pleased to have been afforded more attention than his ninken for once, and started to rise from his crouch with the toy in hand. Aiko decided he wasn’t going fast enough.

She wanted the Stupid Yellow Dog Bone right _now._

Her legs screamed in protest at the additional activity, but Aiko practically catapulted herself off of the couch towards the tall brunette, reaching Koji’s feet in seconds flat as she made demanding grabby hands at him again. Impatience seemed to run rampant in her these days, probably from all the sitting around and having her needs tended to 24/7. Aiko would admit she was getting a tad spoiled, but that wasn’t the issue right now. Right now the issue was the fact that Koji was not giving her the means to alleviate her growing pains.

“Ji! Ji! Ji,” Aiko cried out, eyes wide as she vibrated with excitement. She wasn’t giving Koji the gift of his full name, since Yuuta had also only gotten half of his, but she was certainly going to return the favor of gift-giving.

Koji’s cheeks looked like they hurt from how widely he smiled as he finally relinquished the dog toy to his honorary niece. The Inuzuka’s honey colored eyes were awash with excitement, and he turned to her dad and exclaimed, “Did you hear that?! Little Aiko-chan said my name! Or, part of it! It still counts!”

Ryusuke looked so lost. Aiko watched the adults curiously as she avidly gummed down on the Yellow Bone, almost sighing audibly at the relief it gave her. Koji was the _best._ Suddenly Ryusuke stopped staring vacantly at his daughter and friend, and let his head fall back against the wall with an audible ‘thunk’. “I can’t believe you got my daughter a _chew toy._ ”

Koji looked curiously down at Aiko, who was thoroughly enjoying said chew toy while sitting up against his feet. “I dunno, Ryu. She looks like she likes it. It’s much more durable than the human teething toys I saw, anyway. What’s the problem?”

Without looking up, Ryusuke made an aborted rude gesture at his friend before he realized Aiko was in the room and simply sighed deeply, staring up at the gray ceiling of the living room. “It’s a _dog toy_ , Koji. For dogs. Not for humans. I can’t believe I have to explain to you why this isn’t a thing.”

Koji shrugged. “Just ‘cause it’s for dogs doesn’t mean a human can’t use it.” Ryusuke laughed at that.

“That’s so you, Koji.” Suddenly, it looked like a metaphorical lightbulb lit up in Rysuke’s head. When her dad sat back up to look at Koji with a grin, he said slyly, “Stay for dinner too, why don’t you? I want you to be here to explain to Miyako why you got Ai-chan a dog toy.”

“Nooo,” Koji whined, tossing his gaze nervously to the door as if Miyako would storm in at the very mention of her name. “She’s gonna be _so_ mad. She gets mad about such little things! Your wife can be even scarier than Mom when she’s angry, it’s just a toy man!”

Ryusuke’s grin simply widened.

* * *

When Aiko lay in her crib that night, trying her best to fall asleep, she heard her mother’s incredulous voice echo in the halls of the house saying, “You gave Aiko a _what?!_ ”

She smiled, and pulled the Yellow Bone a little closer to her chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everybody! Here’s the sixth installment in Drowning in a Breath of Fresh Air (or DIABOFA as I call it on my google docs)! I promise the pace will pick up after the next chapter (so after October 10th it should be a little faster). Happy belated birthday to Kakashi, the main love interest who hasn’t even shown up yet! He’ll pop in a few chapters ahead, so please be patient for a little longer. :)
> 
> More Koji and Aiko interaction as well, since previous chapters were all about Yuuta. I hope you liked this chapter, and please leave a kudos or comment if you liked it. If you didn’t like it, tell me what went wrong and I’ll try to see if I fix something in the next update. Thank you all so much for the amazing comments so far, and I love you guys so much!
> 
> Have a great September 25th, and remember to drink water! :)
> 
> \- Meadows


	7. One Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aiko has finally turned one year old. Her birthday party is somewhat chaotic, and a bit of a learning experience for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy birthday to Naruto, who won’t show up in this story for AGES because he’s not of this time. I hope you all enjoy the chapter today!
> 
> Blessings to my beautiful beta, @bloodredpomegranate, she’s the glue keeping this story together.
> 
> \- Meadows

Aiko had a Plan. It was a very specific Plan; in fact, it was the Plan of how she would say her first word. She’d said butchered versions of her honorary uncles’ names before, but personally she didn’t believe those counted. “Yuu” and “Ji” are not words, and her pride was currently at stake over this. Ryusuke and Miyako could get ready to eat their hearts out over this delicious platter of Excellent First Word she was preparing to serve them.

Aiko would be lying if she said she wasn't excited for the event.

Her first word made its appearance at her very first birthday party. Aiko had wanted it to be perfect, adorable, and of course in front of an audience. How many times do you get to plan your own childhood milestone?

Of course, holding back from communicating in an actual verbal way before said birthday party was frustrating to say the least. She had no way to tell her mother that, _no,_ she did _not_ want to wear the stupid yellow dress Miyako had bought for the party. There was no method available to her in which she could ask her father who exactly he had invited, and whether or not she should be prepared to put on her best poker face in front of characters she really shouldn’t be recognizing. Not that she would ever say that to him even if she could, of course, but it would’ve been nice to at least have the option.

All Aiko knew about the time period she had been born into was that they were currently a) fighting a war, and b) under the Sandaime’s reign. The time period over which those vague facts stretched was at least a good thirty years or so, which made pinning down the characters she would meet or the events she would have to go through a hazy guess job, and she had never liked guessing games. Puzzles were fine, she liked logical puzzles. The subjective nature and ensuing frustration of guessing games had always been Unpleasant for her.

When the clock in the living room struck three o’clock, the first parent-child duo arrived and Aiko was thrown bodily into a world of faking normalcy as she tried her very best not to strangle an actual baby. So far her very best was actually quite good, and the infuriating infant in question was still alive and unharmed after ten minutes in her presence. The first arrival to what would turn out to be a less-than-stellar party was a little boy with black hair and innocently wide blue eyes that showed nothing of the truly hair-tearing spirit he displayed the moment he first locked gazes with Aiko.

Every second they spent being the only two in the playpen her parents had set up in the center of the floor was another second she contemplated the murder of a child. It wasn’t going great.

Blue Eyes was making it his personal mission to snatch every toy Aiko tried to get her hands on and throw it out of the pen, all with a huge gummy smile on his face. She hated that smile. She hated that stupid fucking _innocent_ smile of this kid, like he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. They would have to wait as Ryusuke amusedly retrieved said toys for them, since Miyako and the boy’s mother were in deep conversation in the kitchen. Eventually, Aiko gave up and stopped trying to pick up any more, since she felt bad for her father and she knew she would lose it if she paid any more attention to Blue Eyes.

Eventually, other parents started to arrive, and Aiko guessed by how early Blue Eyes had come that his family must live rather close. She dearly and sincerely hoped their parents wouldn’t try to make her play with him over the coming years. If that ever happened, Aiko might truly lose it. Probably at Blue Eyes, and then her parents would have to be explaining to that boy’s parents why Aiko Hadn’t Meant It, and that He’ll Probably Be Fine, and I’m So Sorry.

The next two arrivals came together, one of which was obviously a Nara from the ridiculous spiky hairstyle (either anti-gravity or a genius brand of hair gel at work) and drooping eyes that somehow expressed utter distaste with the waking world even on the cute face of a baby. As soon as the Nara was set in the playpen, the little boy curled up near the edge and fell asleep with what had to be practiced instantaneousness as his father looked on with something that could be construed as exasperated amusement. Probably. He also looked very bored, and she gathered that microexpressions were probably just a Nara Thing. Aiko looked upon the smaller child wistfully, and wished that she could just curl up and say “goodbye” to the waking world like that kid could.

The other newcomer was a girl with deep black eyes (darker even than Yuuta’s) and a purple dress that looked suspiciously similar to her own yellow one. Aiko eyed what she could see of her mother in the kitchen, wondering if she had just picked out the first option she saw in the store or if this was some sort of master plan to make the two girls be friends. She wouldn’t put it past Miyako to have gone shopping with the girl’s mother or something, and purposefully matched their dresses for some devious Motherly Reason. Miyako could be rather crafty when she wanted to be, especially if she thought the outcome would be something cute involving Aiko.

As Purple Dress got plopped into the playpen by her rather scruffy looking father, the girl made eye contact with Aiko and smiled wide as she waved clumsily at her. There were gaps where her teeth hadn’t quite grown in yet, but the smile was charming nonetheless. Aiko smiled back rather hesitantly, unsure of how exactly to interact with a child that young, but Purple Dress seemed not to mind. The other girl seemed ready to make her way over to Aiko, but she was intercepted by Blue Eyes who held a toy out to her with a noticeably less toothful smile.

Aiko gaped at the display, watching the little tyrant make nice with Purple Dress. _That asshole! He’s nice to_ her _but not_ me? _What did I ever do to him?_ The fact that he was a baby did not in any way lessen her definitely righteous anger.

* * *

Aiko was not having any fun.

The remaining children (two of them actually, a boy and a girl, bringing the current total not including Aiko up to a solid five) had arrived promptly at half past three, and it seemed they had all decided they would rather play with each other than with Aiko. Not that Aiko minded, quite the opposite actually. Trying to seem normal by playing with other babies was exhausting, but she couldn’t afford not to at least attempt to socialize with them. If they didn’t want to socialize with her, well, then it wasn’t her fault was it? Couldn’t be helped. While she was sure the babies themselves wouldn’t remember today when they were old enough for her anti-social behavior to matter to them, their parents were definitely keeping a close eye on the playpen, so it was good that she didn’t have too many appearances to try and keep up.

Aiko couldn’t afford to have suspicious adults on her tail while she grew up, she didn’t want to be labeled a threat due to her “antisocial genius” nature. Becoming either a threat or a commodity did not sit right with her innate nature to try and live her life relatively unseen.

 _It still feels unfair to be called a genius_ , she thought gloomily, staring down at her chubby little hands. _I’m just at an unfair advantage because of Before. Put me on the playing field with any adult and I would spectacularly lose in a game of wits._

Yes, Aiko was having a Bad Time at her birthday party.

The parents were simply using the time allotted for the “party” to talk to each other and occasionally take pictures if their kids did anything noteworthy or cute. The Nara kid remained the only sane child, with his preference towards napping off to the side rather than interacting with the other children. Aiko was sorely tempted to do the same, but it seemed that the well-enforced strictures against being a “bad hostess” from her mother Before were still quite present in her.

It was rather unfortunate, considering.

_Even after death it seems I can’t avoid The Rules._

The other five children seemed to be interested in babbling at each other and playing mindless games with the toys provided (her toys, might she add). Aiko had kept Yellow Bone close by, not wanting any of the others to get their grubby hands on her present from Koji.

It was _hers_ , damn it.

Then Purple Dress, with her deep gaze that seemed to stare intently into the farthest reaches of your soul, made direct eye contact with Aiko from across the pen. Those eyes were filled with an unexpected vigor, and she ignored Blue Eyes (who was currently vying for her attention) to stand on wobbly legs and toddle her way over to Aiko. When she crossed the five foot distance, Purple Dress reached out one sticky hand and grabbed Aiko’s own with it, smiling down at the sitting girl with those cutely sparse teeth.

It was, in an odd way, a little reassuring.

Aiko smiled back, and that’s when it slipped out, all rhyme and apparent reason gone. “Hello.”

She couldn’t reel it back into her mouth now that it had left, though she sorely wished she could. Her perfect first word, this carefully planned occasion, all ruined by the smile of a cute kid. How typical of her, she’d always been weak to good smiles. It seems this life was no exception. In the background, Aiko heard the adults stop for a moment, watching the scene occurring in the pen as they seemingly all held their breath. She paid them no mind. The audience she’d planned for didn’t really matter anymore if she couldn’t say the word she wanted to.

Purple Dress smiled even wider, and her voice was high and squeaky as she chirped back, “H’llo!”

The scruffy brunette who had been talking to her father audibly stifled a chuckle at this, and Aiko could hear him murmur not-so-quietly to Ryusuke, “Natsuko seems to be making good friends with your little girl, Ryusuke. Maybe we should set them up on a playdate some time, eh?”

Ryusuke was grinning from ear to ear as he watched Purple Dress — _Natsuko_ — and Aiko interact, murmuring back, “Yeah, let’s. Never thought I’d see the day where an Okabe made friends easily like that, though.” At this last comment the brunette lightly slapped her father’s arm, although he was smiling as he did so.

“Shut up. You’ve only met three Okabes, don’t go making assumptions about us,” the brunette chided.

* * *

Aiko was finally having a Good Time.

Natsuko was proving to be an excellent companion, and was in the middle of playing Toss the Toy with Aiko when cake time was announced. This sparked an instant reaction in the surrounding children, and they all swarmed to the side of the circle closest to the kitchen like a pack of dogs hearing about a fresh steak. They were all drooling and babbling, and climbing on top of each other to reach Miyako first. The only exceptions to this fiasco were the Nara napping by the edge, Aiko herself, and Natsuko. Natsuko seemed anxious to get at the cake as well, eyes big and mouth open, but she was holding back to stay with Aiko at the moment.

The girl in question couldn’t help but feel a little touched at this.

When Aiko moved closer to the napping Nara however, and farther away from the approaching cake, Natsuko looked torn between her newfound friend and delicious sugar. The mental battle looked difficult indeed from the way the girl’s face screwed up and her eyes squinted at first Miyako and then her new friend, who was watching with more than a little amusement. Eventually, it seemed that her interest in Aiko won out, because she quickly waddled in the other girl’s wake as Aiko approached the last kid.

True to Nara fashion, what existed of the child’s hair was pulled up into a spiky ponytail, though those spikes were currently being crushed against the side of the pen while the Nara drifted in the world of baby genius dreams.

Aiko wanted to wake him up for cake, since she was sure even the Nara children couldn’t resist tasty sugar. Call it her kind heart, but she didn’t want him to miss out just because he was pulling the nap she never could. Behind her, she could hear the other three kids squeal as Miyako cut their tiny slices of cake onto paper plates, and she could predict without a doubt that most of it would be going on their faces rather than in their mouths. She knew what baby impulses crossed with baby motor control looked like, and it usually looked like a big fat mess.

Hesitantly, she prodded the sleeping boy on the cheek with her finger.

His skin was surprisingly soft, but she shouldn’t have really been surprised. Every bit of media she’d ever seen involving babies in the Before had said “soft as a baby”, so she really should have known better than to expect anything else. His cheek was squishy to boot, and Aiko understood now why adults had such a hard time trying not to moosh infant faces around.

At the poke, the Nara cracked his eyes open with a pout, and blindly patted her hand away from his face. He made a whining noise, and emphatically said in his drowsy yet high-pitched voice, “No. Sleep.”

Natsuko didn’t seem to agree, because she grabbed the boy’s hand and squeaked, “H’llo!”

Those droopy eyes cracked open once more, and he seemed to look at Natsuko for a long second before he repeated more slowly this time, “No.”

Natsuko’s ever-present smile faltered a little bit, but it came back strong as ever faster than Aiko could even blink as she chirruped, “Yummy! Now!” She would not be dissuaded by the boy’s reluctance, and Aiko wouldn’t admit it but she was impressed.

From out of the corner of her eyes, she could see the older Nara watching the three of them with unreadable eyes, and she suppressed a shiver that ran down her spine. Aiko hadn’t done anything to give herself away, had she? She’d just been sitting, and playing with Natsuko, and trying to wake this kid up for cake. That wasn’t anything suspicious.

 _God, trying to fly under the radar is so stressful. Adding someone from a clan known for their high IQ and observancy skills is so_ not _what I need right now._

Trying her best to ignore the feeling of the elder Nara’s eyes on the back of her head, she grabbed the younger’s free hand (the one not already claimed by Natsuko), and pulled lightly. “C’mon!” There was no room for argument in her tone, authority ringing in her childish voice. It sounded weird to her ears, not at all matching how she had heard her own voice for a little over twenty years Before.

She’d get used to it eventually.

Grumbling loudly, the boy slowly got to his feet, eventually standing a bit taller than either of them at his full height. He followed the two of them to where Miyako was waiting with a big cake and child-sized slices on paper plates at the coffee table next to the pen, the other three children practically salivating at the sight. She smiled as Aiko and her tag-alongs approached, and reached out her hands to pick up her daughter. Aiko went willingly, and watched quietly as her father lit a singular candle stuck in the center of one of the small slices of cake.

“Alright Ai-chan! Blow out the candle,” he said when he was done, pushing the plate a little closer to his daughter so she could reach. “It’s only a proper birthday when you blow out your birthday candle!”

Aiko looked suspiciously up at him, then back down to the cake in front of her. She doubted that she had enough lung power to accurately blow out the candle, especially since it had usually taken her more than one go even with adult lungs Before. After a long moment of expectant smiles all around her, and the increasing whining of the other children, she eventually blew out the candle.

Or rather, she tried to. She pretended not to notice when Ryusuke stealthily joined in on the effort after her third try, the candle going out easily under his helpful efforts. When the flame winked out, Aiko was swung up onto her mother’s hip, making her shriek in surprise at the sudden gesture.

“Happy birthday Aiko-chan! You’re one year old now! What a big girl you are,” Miyako cooed down at her daughter.

And really, she _was_ a year old now, wasn’t she?

The thought hadn’t really occurred to Aiko before this very moment, and time stood still for a moment in the hazy way that it does when your thoughts run a little too fast. There were smiling faces all around her, and the small cheers from the other parents seemed to fall into slow motion as Aiko swallowed over a heavy lump in her throat. 

It had been one year — twelve whole months — since she had died. It almost didn’t feel real, living here, stuck in a world she had once believed to be fiction. A world that she now knew had people that existed outside of “the story”, people who dreamed complex dreams and hoped for a brighter future in their own vulnerable way. People who lived day-to-day, the kinds of people she had known all her life Before.

One year had passed by like a blur, and it still felt like only yesterday she had been reborn. It only felt like yesterday since she first found out where she was.

Just one day ago that she had died.

_This is really real._

Aiko looked around at everyone in her living room, time approaching semi-normal as her thoughts began to catch up with the real world. At her father, with his naturally bright orange hair and scratchy goatee. At her mother, plainly beautiful in the way she smiled down at her daughter, dimples showing at the corners of her mouth. At Natsuko, who was beaming up at her with a smile that was missing a few teeth, and an honest sort of happiness shining brightly in her eyes. At the Younger Nara, who was watching her with dark and droopy ones that shone with childlike curiosity. 

_These are real people, who will undergo real hardships in the years I’m going to know them. These aren’t characters in a story, they’re not disposable NPCs. They think and they feel and they laugh and they cry. They worry and love and hope just like I do._

_They’re human in every possible way._

This was something important for Aiko to consider. In a way, even though she’d clearly seen the people around her act the way normal people generally do, she’d never considered it to be fully real. It felt like a funny dream, or like looking at a movie through foggy glass, but never something tangible. Never something real. It felt like some sort of game where she could pick and choose what happened around her.

But she couldn’t, could she?

When she picked and chose her life, she upset those around her. This wasn’t a simulator game. This life wasn’t something she could play around with and pretend everything was fine, free of consequences.

She had to be here for a reason, instead of heaven or hell or whatever was _supposed_ to come after life.

_Right?_

Finally, the world caught up to speed, and if anyone noticed that her smile was a little tremulous, they didn’t say anything as the last remaining glow of fire clinging to the candle wick faded out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! I am absolutely BLOWN AWAY by the amount of kudos, comments, and bookmarks I’ve received on this story! Never in a million years did I dream that so many people would actually enjoy what I write! Thank you all so, so much, and I hope you continue to like the story as it progresses! :)
> 
> The pace will begin to pick up a little after this chapter, becoming less time centric and more episodic. Please drop a comment or a kudos if you liked this chapter, and leave a comment to tell me if you don’t! I try to reply to every comment!
> 
> Also, new characters! Can anyone guess who Mr. Okabe (Natsuko’s dad) is? He’s not a canon character, but he’s been mentioned a few times in past chapters. I look forward to seeing your theories!
> 
> \- Meadows


	8. When it Rains, it Pours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Aiko finds an old friend and rediscovers some old memories; bad and good alike.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter contains content that may be triggering or uncomfortable for some readers. If you have water based trauma or become uncomfortable at a graphic scene of death, please skip when you see "she remembered now as a brief and detached flash in her mind" all the way to the end of the italicized portion. If you are fine with reading that portion, please continue at your own leisure.
> 
> Because this warning is so important, I will leave the rest of my usual thoughts for the end of today's chapter. As always, many thanks to my wonderful beta for helping me: @bloodredpomegranate.
> 
> Please enjoy the chapter!
> 
> \- Meadows

Aiko and her father were at the training ground once again, but this time Ryusuke grabbed her before she could run off into the leaves. Ever since Aiko had figured out the correct balancing method for running, she’d been doing it practically non stop whenever they came out to train together. Ryusuke had also started training solo while she went off on her own now that he was confident she wouldn't fall over.

However, it was clear that this time they weren’t here to “train” in the traditional method.

Ryusuke sat them both down, knee-to-knee, under the shade of one of the larger trees. Aiko’s parents had told her that summer was always hot here, but it seemed like this summer was already even thicker and more humid than the last one she had experienced by a considerable measure. She was glad to have the shade above them, and the way the trees formed around the clearing made it easier for a cool breeze to come running through the trunks.

Her father set a box the size of his large hand in between them, and Aiko heard a rattle as it came in contact with the ground. Curiously, she reached for the box to see what was inside.

Her father’s hand pushed her own away.

“You can’t open the box,” he said sternly. “Only I can open the box, okay?”

Aiko looked up at him with wide eyes, and nodded. “Okay! What’s in it?”

He laughed, and ruffled her hair as he replied, “That’s what you’re about to learn! We’ve done enough physical training in the past year, but now you have to train your head too!” One finger tapped his temple to emphasize his point.

Aiko blinked, and looked back down to the box as she cocked her head to the side. “A puzzle?”

“Kind of! The game we’re about to play is called Hatsume Shuffle!” At this, he poked her knee to get her attention again. She looked up, and he continued, “I’m going to show you what’s in the box for ten seconds, and then I’m going to close it again. Your job is to tell me as much as you can about what was inside!”

“Oh,” Aiko murmured, looking at the unassuming box again. _So he’s trying to teach me Kim’s Game. Hatsume Shuffle, huh? I wonder how it got called that?_ She turned her gaze back up to her dad and clasped her little hands together as she chirped, “Okay! I wanna play!”

Her dad smiled at her, and ruffled her hair again fondly, making her pout. “Alright, Ai-chan, let’s play!”

He took the box in hand and faced the opening catch towards her as he asked, “Ready?”

She nodded fervently, and he opened the catch. Her eyes roved over the items in the box, hit with a wave of nostalgia as the memory of playing this very game with another father in another time crashed into her. Her nose burned the way it always did before she cried, but she blinked hard to rid herself of the feeling.

She was in the here and now, and she really had to do her best at this game.

She could see two kunai, a shuriken, a little plastic toy that looked like a ramen bowl, and a coin before the box was snapped shut in front of her. Aiko whined, and slapped her hands on her knees. “I was distracted! Again, Daddy!”

Her father chuckled and tweaked her nose, a familiar gesture although it was usually from her mother, and said, “Not yet, Ai-chan. First, what did you see?”

She repeated the list with a pout, and she could see his lips twitch as he fought off an amused smile at her expense. “That was actually pretty good, Ai-chan! You remembered most of the items on your first try! What color was the wrapping on the kunai?”

She crossed her arms and moved her gaze away from her dad’s eyes as she mumbled, “I dunno…”

“How about the toppings on the ramen?”

Aiko looked down at her crossed legs and clasped her hands together, voice quiet as she repeated, “I dunno.”

“That’s okay, Ai-chan. I’m going to show it to you again for another ten seconds, and I want you to remember everything you can about what’s inside, okay?” Ryusuke didn’t sound disappointed, which was at least something. Aiko was disappointed in herself, however. She’d played this game so many times Before, and now she was doing terribly at it.

She’d do better the next time.

Aiko looked up again, hands on her knees as she chirped fiercely, “Again!”

* * *

They had been playing “Hatsume Shuffle” for about an hour, her father replacing the items with others he pulled from a bag whenever she got too good at repeating details about the items in the box, and occasionally “shuffling” old items back in. Then it started to rain.

She had expected the rain at some point, since it had been practically pouring out all week, but truth be told she had thought it would have been closer to evening when it actually came down. Ryusuke also noticed the strengthening drizzle, and started to pack up the items and the box.

“Alright, Ai-chan, looks like the sky is telling us it’s time to go home,” he joked as he made sure everything was packed away correctly in the black baby bag. 

Aiko nodded in agreement. She started to clumsily get to her feet when something rustled in the nearby brush. Her father looked up from the bag with a glint in his eye as he watched the bushes for more movement. Aiko, now standing, did the same.

Her heart beat in her chest, her mind running over every time someone had gotten attacked or kidnapped by foreign ninja at training grounds in the Naruto series. She wasn’t important enough to kidnap, was she? Her parents didn’t _seem_ super important or powerful, but then again, she didn’t really see them doing ninja stuff much.

Then, there was a pitiful mewl.

Two green eyes glinted through the leaves of some of the shorter bushes, and as Aiko took a step closer she could make out some white fur as well. Ryusuke also seemed to have relaxed at the meow, returning to packing up the bag (though she could tell his attention was still primarily on Aiko and the probable-cat).

She slowly reached out her hand towards the bush when she got close, clicking her untrained tongue and calling lowly, “Here, kitty kitty!”

A small pink nose sniffed the air, and after a moment a drenched white kitten wobbled out of the bushes with its tail sticking straight up into the air. It was a pitiable sight. The kitten seemed to eye her warily for a long second, but something in those emerald eyes must have decided she was trustworthy because suddenly it was tripping over itself to get to her, butting its head up against her legs.

The gesture was almost familiar, and as she reached a hand out to pet the small being it wrapped its tail around her thin wrist. Then, with the sound of pouring rain in her ears and the tail curled around her outstretched arm, it all clicked into place and she was thrown back into a memory.

* * *

_It was a day just like any other for Alice Jones, college student extraordinaire. Finals were rapidly approaching at Baker University, and she had about a million different final essays and reports to finish up before they started. Just your normal, average day._

_Then, her phone started to ring just as she was settling in for an evening of pizza and frantic compiling of her dissertation, the current bane of her existence._

_The caller ID read as her Aunt Maya, a kind woman who had helped her write her scholarship application essay all those years ago for Baker, and whom she had lived with for a few years when she was a child. The phone call wasn’t particularly out of place, since her aunt called her about once or twice every few weeks, but something about the way the blaring ringtone ruptured the stillness of the night unsettled Alice._

_Her gut squirmed with a bad feeling, but she picked the phone up from its place next to her laptop and swiped right to accept the incoming call, pressing the badly scuffed device up against her ear._

_“Hello? Auntie Maya? What’s up?”_

_The voice at the other end of the call was crackly, signaling that her aunt was in some place with less-than-great quality reception. Alice could faintly hear the noise of people talking in the background over the extra noise as her aunt said, “Hey, girlie! How are you? How’s your prep going for finals?”_

_Aunt Maya sounded a little nervous, but Alice didn’t think much of it. Aunt Maya almost always sounded nervous. It was just the way her voice worked, a product of speaking quietly for_ years _until she’d gotten that job as a receptionist back when Alice was in middle school._

_"I'm good, Auntie," Alice replied. "Finals prep is going okay. Professor Garcia is letting me write my essay for Stats early, so that's at least one thing off my plate." She took a bite of jalapeño and sausage pizza. "What about you? It's unusual for you to call so late."_

_As she waited for a response, Alice got up and absently wandered around, looking for paper towels to wipe the grease off her hands. They weren't on the rack where they were supposed to be_ _, which meant she and Erinne would be having a talk when the other girl got back from her trip to 7/11. Her roommate was always forgetting to put things back around the apartment, and while Alice could theoretically put up with it, it didn’t mean she was going to. She scribbled down on a post-it to remind herself to have said conversation and stuck it on the fridge._

_Aunt Maya’s voice was quiet when she finally responded, but Alice could hear her next words as clear as if she’d shouted them. “Oh honey, I don’t know how to tell you this…”_

_Alice's secondary bite of pizza stuck in her throat. Aunt Maya's voice was a strange mix of slightly nervous and very sad, a combination that stopped Alice in her tracks. "What?" she asked, voice thick. "What's wrong, Auntie? What happened?"_

_“Little Man got out earlier, and we just got a call from a vet saying that someone brought him in.” Maya’s apologetic voice was distant in Alice’s ears, and she felt like she was swimming through molasses as she moved to her apartment door, listening to her aunt’s explanation as she went. “They said it looked like a stray got him, and they don’t know if he’ll make it through the night. I’m so sorry honey.”_

_Alice tumbled down the apartment building’s stairs, keys jangling in her hand as she heard herself say stiffly, “I’m on my way.”_

_Maya sounded alarmed as she replied, “Honey, your finals are next week! You’re about to graduate, you can’t be driving all the way out here!”_

_Alice got into the driver’s side of her car, shoving McDonald’s wrappers out of the way as she firmly repeated, “I’m on my way.”_

_The drive to Aunt Maya’s house was supposed to take three hours._ _Alice drove like she meant to make it in one. As she swerved down the highways, quite a few miles above the speed limit, she couldn't stop thinking about Little Man. All she could do was helplessly turn the last time she'd seen him over and over in her head._

_Little Man was a stray kitten Aunt Maya had taken in when the mother who used to live under their porch was hit by a car one night when Alice had been very young. Since Alice’s mother worked all the time to keep her small political office, and her father was overseas at the time, Alice had used to live at Aunt Maya and Uncle Raymond’s house. Life in suburbia was drastically different from the big city her parents lived in, quiet nights filled with cicada noise making it easy to hear small disturbances in the night._

_If it had been in the city, Alice wouldn’t have heard Little Man’s cries outside her bedroom window that evening. She had been the one to convince her aunt and uncle to take the poor kitten in, promising she would take care of him and everything with big pleading eyes. She had even been the one to name the kitten “Little Man”, for his loud cries despite his impossibly small size. She had firmly vetoed the name “Snowy” from Maya, saying that he wasn’t some fairy tale cat._

_Uncle Raymond had always said Little Man was more Alice’s cat than their own._

_When Alice had moved away for Baker, the only reason she didn’t take Little Man with her was because the dorm didn’t allow pets of any sort. She regretted not taking an apartment off campus now, not fighting harder to just spend a little longer with him. Now Little Man was dying, and she wasn’t even around to be there for him in his last moments._

_Alice was crying heavily as she sped up, tears blurring her vision and obscuring the road in front of her. She didn’t see the semi in her lane until it was too late._

_Alice slammed on her brakes and yanked the wheel to the side to avoid the inevitable collision, but the car’s tires slid on puddled rainwater covering the road over the bridge and took her farther than she had planned to go. Unable to gain traction, Alice couldn’t stop her little Honda Civic from skidding sideways on the asphalt and hitting the railing, tearing through the metal barring her from the wide river below like it was mere tissue paper._

_As she fell, she flashed back to a long-ago moment from just after she had gotten her license, her mother sitting her down for a rare talk before the usually absent woman flew off for a conference across the country. Her mother had tried to scare Alice into accepting the driver she’d picked out for her, citing frequent causes of death from car-related accidents. The surprising amount of sheer gruesome details the woman provided was more than enough to make a girl sick. The hour after her mother had left, not a hair out of place as if she hadn’t just tried to convince her daughter that she would die horrifically on the road someday, Alice had researched ways to prevent said unusual accidents._

_In an odd way, her mother’s talk had simply heightened Alice’s safe driving practices._

_She remembered now as a brief and detached flash in her mind, that in cases where your car hits a body of water you should try to get out while the car was still afloat. By the time her hands caught up with her brain however, she was already sinking. That left the second method. When your car is sinking, roll down the window to relieve pressure and swim out through the opening. Adrenaline pumped through Alice’s veins, making her movements jerky as she unbuckled her seatbelt and pressed the button to make the driver’s side window lower._

_It wouldn’t budge, simply buzzing futilely as it lost the battle with water pressure._

_Panic started to settle into her veins, pulse thundering as her eyes darted around the interior of a car to search for something, anything, she could do. Her sharp gaze lighted on the windshield. A bigger window, rather. Hard to break, but under this pressure she had no doubt she could do it._

_She maneuvered onto the seat and thrust both of her legs at the large pane of glass as water started to seep treacherously in to the floor of her car, trickling through the cracks under the doors. The quiet rush of water and the booming pounding of debris against metal was paired with the buzzing in her ears as she afforded all of her focus to the task at hand. After a few good kicks, she heard a clear pop for one neatly frozen moment in time, and then time went on moving with an answering crack of warning before the windshield buckled and exploded under the combined pressure of her feet and the deep water surrounding the car._

_Unfortunately, this also meant that Alice was slammed with a wall of freezing river water as her windshield shattered into the car, lungs emptying immediately and the sheer force behind the wave of water slamming her head into the glass of the driver’s side window. Shards lodged in her soft flesh, and blood lifted from her body through the water as she moved her eyes dizzily to the new point of exit._

_She couldn’t breathe._

_“When you drown,” she could suddenly remember her father telling her once before getting sent away that very last time, “your instincts tell you to kick, to jump, you’re so_ desperate _to get to that surface, your body acts as if you’re runnin’ to get there. Don’t ever let the water tell you to stop runnin’ towards the surface darlin’, or it’ll never let you go.”_

_Alice clawed herself towards the light of the moon far above, fingers scraping against the sharp pieces of glass still lining the spot where her windshield had once been, red blood spilling like dark ribbons into the murky water surrounding her as she wiggled out of her car and up towards that ghostly light. Her lungs were starting to burn horrendously, screaming their protest at lack of oxygen in tandem with the screaming pain in her body, warmth leaving her doubly fast as her blood mingled with the icy water._

_Kicking out once more towards the surface, she clutched at her throat, willing herself to stop trying to inhale what wasn’t there. The moon didn’t seem to be getting any closer, and flashing lights were now joining it in lighting the way up for her._

_She couldn’t make her legs move, she couldn’t think._

How do you swim? _Alice wondered, panic rushing through her as her mind went haywire. Her ears had already popped under the pressure, and the thick silence underwater was oppressive._

_She felt like she was going to explode._

_It was just too_ much _, and her lungs gave out and she took a deep, deep breath on pure instinct. She just wanted to_ breathe _again. This wasn’t air though, and Alice was choking on the water she had inhaled. She felt so heavy, and the water inside her lungs felt like a weight sitting on her chest. The pain was inside her now, and her muscles spasmed as she began to sink again._

It hurts… Please…

_The water around her was void-like as she watched the moon get farther and farther away from her, pulling her into the deep abyss waiting below. It was dark now, and she could faintly catch the light of her high beams refracted in the water off to her right._

Huh. Is this what dying is like?

_Alice felt calm, serene almost as she hit the sandy bottom of the riverbank. Her vision was spotting, and as she looked ahead she almost thought she could see the face of her father in the far-away moon._

_Then, she knew no more._

* * *

Aiko’s chest seized with a flash of memory, stealing the air from her lungs for a terrible moment. Her nose burned again in warning as she stared down at the familiar white kitten at her feet. His tail slid against her wrist in an achingly familiar gesture, and her heart sped up.

In a heavy and accented attempt at her once native language, she said, “ **Little Man?** ”

The kitten purred, and she couldn’t help the tears that slid down her cheeks, thankful for the surrounding rain that covered them. Behind her, she could hear her father murmur a butchered repetition of the English she had accidentally spoken, but she couldn’t bring herself to care much. The English was a small slip, and would be easily forgotten.

This was Little Man, here in front of her now. She just _knew_.

Suddenly, a fierce determination struck her, and she picked the squirming kitten up and clutched it to her small chest as she turned to her dad. “Daddy, we have to keep him!”

Ryusuke looked nervously down at the drenched animal in her arms, and his mouth opened to say something, but something in her expression made him close it again. He crouched down in front of her and looked down at Little Man again, then back up to her as he sighed, “We can take him home.”

Her face lit up with joy as she cried, “Really?!”

It was cut short however when he poked her cheek and sternly said, “We have to talk to Mommy about keeping it any longer than tonight, though. It’s her house too.”

Aiko didn’t mind. Somehow she felt like Miyako wasn’t going to be hard to convince.

* * *

She was right.

Miyako had easily given Aiko permission to keep Little Man “as long as you take care of it”. A life of cat-care from Before made Aiko enthusiastically promise to do so.

When Little Man finally met Shun for the first time, it was almost a month later, due to some unforeseen missions Koji (and thus his canine companion) had been sent on that summer. The two Inuzuka members burst into their living room on what had previously been a very calm and slow day for Aiko, caked in mud and blood and seeking Ryusuke with lopsided grins.

What they found instead was Aiko curled up on the couch with a little white furball curled up in her lap, both cozy parties looking ruffled and disgruntled at the intrusion.

Koji stopped dead in the entry hall, halfway through toeing off his shoes. Shun, likewise, paused the wiping of his paws on the “Shun Mat” to give a cock of his head at the unfamiliar presence of Little Man.

Koji seemed to voice both of their thoughts when he warily asked, “Your parents...got a cat?”

Aiko blinked at the muddy man, then looked down at Little Man in her lap. “No.” Koji seemed to slump in relief at that, but her next words as she caught his eyes caught him off guard.

“ _I_ got a cat.”

Shun seemed to have fewer inhibitions about approaching the couch than his master did, plodding with mostly clean paws up to the coffee table before he stopped, having a staring contest with Little Man. The feline’s tail twitched at the tip, but he seemed otherwise calm as he locked eyes with a dog at least ten times larger than him. Perhaps it was the high ground.

In her peripheral, Aiko saw Koji slink around the other side of the coffee table and scamper down the hallway, presumably to find her father. She absently wondered what issues he had with cats, but her attention was drawn back to the animals in front of her as Shun took a small step forward, all other thoughts fading into oblivion.

The big hound scooted inches closer, and Little Man’s tail twitching increased in speed.

Aiko felt a little bit like she was watching an epic showdown with all the tension in the air.

Shun’s tongue lolled about from his excited doggy smile, and Little Man looked long suffering when those green eyes looked up to her and then back at Shun. Aiko couldn’t feel a smidge of sympathy for the feline. One hand stroked the kitten’s back, and the other found itself propping her chin up against the arm of the couch as she looked on.

Shun’s tail wagged, Little Man’s body tensed, and Aiko just smiled.

At least this wasn’t boring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everybody! I hope wherever you are, you're having a good day so far! Remember to get adequate sleep and drink some water if you haven't yet!
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed the chapter today! I have a few things to address to you guys as a whole, so I'll write them here in the end notes:
> 
> 1\. I'm quaking in my BOOTS guys! There's so many comments, bookmarks, and kudos! I can't believe you guys really enjoy my story that much, it makes me really happy to see! I love you all so much, and I PROMISE we're getting to the real plot soon. I'm just a sucker for some sweet happy childhood before we get into the real nitty-gritty of this world. That brings me to my next point, though!
> 
> 2\. Many of you have been wondering when Kakashi (the love interest and a very important character) will appear! Short answer: in two or three chapters. Long answer: remember the tags? At the very end it mentions just how messed up Kishimoto's general timeline is. I had some very specific needs for when and where in Aiko's life some things take place, and unfortunately that meant that slotting in Kakashi immediately had to get de-prioritized. By that, I mean that he and Aiko are not the exact same age, so he is a little younger than her. As I write this I do not have my timeline in front of me, but I believe he is one year younger than her. That means that right now, he is practically freshly born, and would have no direct cause to have met Aiko yet. Don't worry though, because he WILL show up in the next few chapters.
> 
> 3\. Speaking of the next few chapters, I have a sad note for you all. Until my school hits winter break, I will probably move chapter publications to once a month on the 25th. I wrote a whole bunch of this for Camp NaNoWriMo in the summer, but now I'm running out of drafted chapters and I don't have the time to quality-assure a chapter every 15 days anymore. The schedule should pick back up in January however, so don't worry too much. I hope that's alright with you all!
> 
> As always, please drop a kudos or a comment if you enjoyed this chapter, and even drop a comment if you didn't! I try to reply to every comment! Have a great and very wonderful day everybody! :)
> 
> \- Meadows


	9. Just Us Two (Pt. 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aiko’s dad and surrogate uncles have gone off to the border, leaving Aiko alone with her slightly estranged mother. How will this turn out for our lovable protagonist?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everybody! Long time no see, huh? Sorry for being so INCREDIBLY late, and for only having one chapter to show for it! Life’s been rough, and I don’t really have the time necessary to work on this fic 24/7. Now, that’s not me saying I’m abandoning it any way! Absolutely not! It just means that the schedule (for the foreseeable future) is completely and fully gone. Kaput, nada, nothing. It will be very irregular, but there WILL be new chapters!
> 
> I hope you all like this new chapter, and please don’t be TOO mad at me for my extended absence in the comments!
> 
> \- Meadows
> 
> P.S. This chapter is unbetaed, I wanted to get it as hot-off-the-press as I could for you guys to make up for my time away! You’re all the best, thank you for your patience!

By the time autumn arrived with a whisper and a chill, Aiko’s father had been sent off again on another long-term mission. From what she’d heard of the hushed conversation between her parents before he’d left for the border, it was going to be a pretty permanent post. The Hokage had not given a definite release date for the mission, and that meant that for the foreseeable future the only method of contact their family had would be short letters at the end of every month.

It wasn’t nearly enough.

Her father’s absence also corresponded with Koji and Yuuta being pulled away to the border as well, leaving Miyako and Aiko alone with each other. Her usual babysitters gone, all of Aiko’s time was now spent with her mother. Not that she was complaining, it was just a little strange. She hadn’t interacted with Miyako as much as she had with her father and his team, her mother often being gone to whatever work she did before Aiko woke up in the mornings.

These days, it was Mom Time 24/7.

The night her father had left, Aiko had been unable to sleep, kept up by visions of caskets and red-white-and-blue flags folded carefully into perfect triangles as rain beat like grim drums upon the hard-packed ground.

She could not lose another father to war.

Morning had come eventually, pink light bleeding through the shuttered window in her room. The sheet on her small bed was crumpled up by the foot, tossed off when it got too warm, and the timid sunlight found Aiko sitting upright with eyes closed and hands clutching her knees. She was finally practicing again with her chakra, having realized that the uncomfortable feeling of an extra organ was mostly gone by the time she had reached a year and half of age. The teething theory seemed to have been correct on her part, which meant that with more frequent use the feeling would evaporate completely over time.

The energy within her seemed to be centered near her heart, but the way it acted was very odd. It almost felt like being filled with carbonated water, the way it trickled through her system very cool and fluid, but with a note of buzz and fizz hidden underneath. It wasn’t uncomfortable, merely an odd sensation. She noticed that when she concentrated very hard, she could even feel the chakra that leaked out through her skin, creating an odd extension of her senses that spread slowly like low-lying smoke throughout her room.

As she was doing this, she felt the smoke meet something that was very un-smoke like. Close to the door, just outside of it, she felt her energy creep up something that felt warm. It was like a summer day, a pleasant breeze blowing by and ruffling your hair as the sun warms your skin.

Aiko opened her eyes, curious to find what this warmth was originating from. When she looked towards her door, however, she saw her mother standing there with an odd look on her face.

“Mommy? What’s wrong?”

Her mother simply shook her head, the strange expression on her face melting into her usual smile. “It’s nothing, Aiko-chan. Ready to have Mommy all to yourself today?”

Aiko bit her lip uncertainly and hesitated a moment before saying, “Don’t you have to go to work?”

Her mother smiled, and sat next to Aiko on the bed. Hugging her daughter into her side, Miyako asked softly, “How do you feel about coming to work with Mommy, huh? I work in the Hokage Tower and it’s pretty cool there. What do you say?”

Aiko blinked. “You work with Hokage-sama?”

Miyako laughed, and tweaked her daughter’s nose, making Aiko scrunch it up and lean away. “Kind of! Not really, but I get to deliver stuff to him sometimes.”

“What’s Hokage-sama like?”

Aiko watched her mother’s face make an odd, screwed-up expression as she tried to find a way to answer her daughter’s question. Aiko was genuinely curious what someone who directly interacted semi-regularly with the Sandaime thought about him, since all of her information about his personality came filtered through what she knew from Before of his interactions with Naruto and sometimes Kakashi. She wouldn’t call that an exactly reliable source of information, since those two were mostly just kids the old man had taken under his grandfatherly wing for the sake of plot.

She had no idea what the man was like realistically in his professional life, but she doubted her mother would give her a serious and thorough answer in that regard for several years. As of now, all Miyako would give her was, “Hokage-sama is an understanding man.”

The tight smile on her mother’s face and the carefully chosen words used to describe their village leader showed Miyako’s feelings about him quite clearly in subtext. Aiko couldn’t dig too deeply into it, lest she misunderstand something vital, but she thought she could glean a little of what her mother meant.

She’d known many “understanding people” Before, people who would listen to your issue with their actions, but turn around and do it all over again with no remorse. Professors, friends, even family. They’d sympathize with you, and tell you that they “understand where you’re coming from”, but for some reason or another find an excuse to do what you’ve asked them not to anyway.

She turned her gaze to her mother, who was looking down at her with a smile. Miyako’s voice was soft as she said, “Hey now. I can see the gears turning in your pretty head, Aiko-chan, you’ve always been a little too smart for your own good. Let me clear it up for you.”

Her mother pulled Aiko onto her lap, and started petting the young girl’s hair as she explained softly, “Hokage-sama isn’t a perfect god, Aiko-chan. He’s human, just like the rest of us, and sometimes humans have a hard time. Not every decision he makes works, and not every policy turns out good for everyone. The most important and valuable tool he has as our Hokage however, is his ability to empathize with us regular people. Do you know what empathy means?”

Aiko nodded. “Empathy is when you can understand a person’s feelings. When you put yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

“That’s right,” Miyako said with a smile, patting Aiko’s cheek. “Empathy is understanding and sharing someone’s feelings, and being able to reflect that back to them. Hokage-sama is great at empathy, and that’s why I said he’s an understanding man. I don’t always agree with everything he says or does, but he knows the limits to which he can push his ninja. He knows when to let someone take leave because their family member is sick, or when to order someone to take a break because they’ve been working too hard. He’s a good man.”

Aiko hoped that was true. Fiction couldn’t perfectly match reality. There had to be something about the Sandaime that Miyako just wasn’t telling her. Whether it was because she was too young, or because it was something treasonous to say, she couldn’t tell. Either way, there was definitely something that Miyako was still hiding about the old man.

She fiddled with her fingers for a moment, and then looked back up at her mother. Aiko’s voice was carefully timid as she said, “Okay then. I wanna go to work with you.”

Miyako smiled in relief, clearly unsure of what would have happened if Aiko had said “no” to the proposal. She ruffled her daughter’s hair and said, “Alright then! Do you want to bring a toy so you don’t get bored?”

Aiko nodded, even though she had no plans to sit still and play while her mother worked.

Fifteen minutes later, Aiko was in her mother’s arms as they exited the house, making sure to lock the door behind them. The air outside was crisp, as it had been for the last few weeks, but Aiko didn’t mind all that much. It simply meant that winter was getting closer, and Aiko loved winter the most out of all the seasons. She’d mostly missed last winter since she spent most of her time inside and sleeping during those early months, but she was ready to experience the snow and wind this year.

Lost in her daydreams of winter as she was, Aiko was caught off guard and screamed when her mother jumped onto the roof. Her heart beat erratically in her small chest, and her fists hurt from how hard she was clutching the front of her mother’s white sweater. When she looked up with big eyes, she found Miyako holding back a chuckle above her.

“I’m sorry, Aiko-chan. I forgot this was your first time roof-hopping,” her mother explained solemnly, though the upward curve at the corners of her mouth belied her true feelings on the matter. Frowning, Aiko smacked her flat palm on her mother’s chest once.

“That was scary!”

“I’m sorry, honey. We’re running a little late today, so I have to go pretty fast.” Her mother smiled, and held Aiko a little closer as she added, “Hold on tight!”

Aiko barely had time to clench her small fists tighter in the soft fabric of her mother’s sweater before Miyako was running, footsteps miraculously silent as they sped along on the flat roofs of their neighbor’s houses. Chilly wind rushed playfully through her tied up hair like an overexcited puppy greeting its master after a long time away, but Aiko was busy screwing her eyes up tight to avoid looking down at the street far below.

A warm hand soothingly rubbed against her back, and Miyako’s voice called down to her past the noisy rush of wind surrounding them, “Don’t worry! I’ve got you, Aiko-chan! It’ll be over soon!”

Aiko squinted up at her mother with a scowl of disbelief on her chubby cheeks, but what she saw then was something that made the somewhat hazy figure of her mostly absent mother sharpen brightly to a wonderful relief of the woman behind the role. She hated to say it, but she didn’t see Miyako often enough to understand the third member of the household. Aiko knew the woman was her mother, and she knew some of her little quirks, but besides that it was just memories of lullabies before bed and tired feeding in the mornings.

Now, she finally understood why her mother had felt like the wind and warmth earlier. Miyako’s eyes reflected the crisp image of clouds flying high in the blue sky above, free and light as a feather dancing in the breeze. Her mother’s smiling cheeks were turning red against the chill in the air, but the beam gracing her face filled Aiko with the sense of encapsulated rays of sunshine and love, a rare sort of unbridled joy hiding in the dimples at the corners of her mouth that made you want to laugh along at the joke. Her mother’s arms felt safe wrapped around her small body, and Aiko knew then that there was no way Miyako would let her fall.

She felt secure and warm, and Aiko wondered why she hadn’t seen these parts of her mother before. She wondered if the long workday and the stress of the war had stripped those important and shining parts away from Miyako, made her tuck them away in a little box for when the future became bright again, back where she stored memories of youth and wonder. Years fell from her mother’s face as Miyako flew from roof to roof, and some part of Aiko wished deeply that her mother would look happy and free like this forever.

They arrived at the tower in what felt like mere moments, though it must have been longer. Aiko wished it had lasted even a moment more, watched mournfully as the glee of roof-hopping faded from Miyako’s expression to be replaced with the stony mask Aiko saw her wear most days. There were still traces of that mischievous joy lurking at the edges of her eyes, hidden in the slight upturn of her lips, but those too slid away as Aiko looked on.

Aiko was shifted from her position leaning up against Miyako’s shoulder to a more comfortable seat on her mother’s hip as they headed in to the Hokage Tower. Wide eyes took in the variety of sights within the managerial center of the village, darting from place to place eagerly. A tired-looking yet smiling receptionist (who she later learned was named Eijiro Ushiji, a close friend of her mother) was speaking to a family of spiky-haired brunettes at the central desk. Seated in the rows of chairs up against the wall seemed to be several genin teams and their senseis, the students of whom all looked rather put out at being here this early in the morning.

Her mother swept past all of them (besides a quick nod to Eijiro), and took the stairs curving around the back of the room two at a time with ease. Her mother’s gait was smooth and seemingly unbothered, but Aiko could tell from the tension hovering at the edges of Miyako’s expression that they were probably quite late indeed and needed to make up time where they could. A small twinge of guilt pinged in Aiko’s mind as she realized it was probably her question and answer session about the Hokage earlier that caused them to be late.

In her defense, she didn’t actually know they were running short on time when she breached the subject. If she had, she would have reluctantly waited until a lull in the workday to ask her mother what she wanted to ask.

As it stood, they reached Miyako’s presumed work floor in less than a minute, and Aiko peered curiously at the faces of the people inside as her mother passed by the cubicle area to an office door in the far back of the room. Were they going to Miyako’s superior directly to clock in? It seemed odd, but then again Aiko had only been acquainted with American part-time work culture Before, perhaps this was just the thing to do here.

Upon entrance to the office, the true reason for being there was suddenly abundantly clear. This wasn’t a superior’s office. It was _Miyako’s_ office. Everything suddenly made a whole lot of sense. The long hours. The quick flip to a serious expression when they arrived at the Tower. The slightly nervous glances from the shinobi and civilians in the cubicles as the two passed by. Why Miyako had gone straight back to work as soon as the Hokage had allowed her to.

_Especially_ why her mother had been hesitant to say anything bad about Hiruzen when Aiko had asked.

As Aiko was set down to stand on the floor by her mother, she took the opportunity to look around and try to gather more information about the mysterious Miyako. The office itself was sparsely decorated, but Aiko could see through the intentional placement of filing cabinets to fill the room (and the slightly hidden nature of the adorning knick-knacks) that Miyako was actually trying very hard to keep her workspace minimalist. There was only one bright thing in the burgundy and walnut color palette of the room, and that happened to be a small potted fern sitting on the corner of her desk.

Even the pot was eccentric in its pattern, decorated with a splash of bright yellows and oranges, and as Aiko peered suspiciously at the plant she gathered that it was probably a gift of some sort. If she had to place bets, she would say it was either from a close coworker or her direct superior, from the fact that it was brazenly displayed in the room when it was almost offensively mismatched from the rest of the interior decorating scheme.

Miyako must have seen her puzzling over the fern, because when Aiko looked up, her mother was watching her with a slight upturn to her mouth.

“Wondering about the fern?”

Aiko nodded. “Why’s it so ugly?”

Miyako snorted, clearly not expecting that response. “You know, I asked the same thing when I got it. The friend who gave it to me wasn’t very happy when I said that.”

“Why don’t you replace the pot?”

“Well,” Miyako started, pulling a wiggling Aiko to sit on her knee, “if I did that then my friend wouldn’t be very happy with me. She said I need a little more joy in my office, so I keep it around even if I secretly think it’s ugly.” She winked, and tweaked Aiko’s nose, causing the little girl to twist away and make a face.

* * *

Aiko ended up sending out her chakra smoke again while Miyako worked, not feeling very interested in “playing” with Yellow Bone, which she had brought along to appease Miyako’s sense of child normalcy. In comparison, the chakra smoke was much more fun and interesting to experiment with than Yellow Bone would ever be _(no offense, Koji)._

Miyako’s chakra was fascinating to feel, the warmth of it comforting and the freedom of the way it rushed around making Aiko feel light. As the hours started to pass, she started to sense a pattern in the way it rushed around, ebbing and flowing at certain points in ways that seemed unlike it should. Time would tick by, and the flow would be almost agitated and insistent, but then a moment would come where it stopped altogether before it calmed down once more.

She was interrupted in her close examination of her mother’s chakra when a tendril of something else snaked in to her smoke just as the flow was getting agitated again. The jarring addition of another chakra to her awareness caused her focus to break, and she hit her hands on her knees in frustration as she opened her eyes to glare at the door to the office.

According to her smoke, something cool and smooth was waiting just outside, and her knowledge was confirmed by a light rapping of knuckles on the door.

“Come in,” her mother called out, finger tapping mindlessly on her desk as she looked at the door.

It pushed open to reveal a slight woman with a big smile on her face and curly blonde hair piled up in three small buns on her head. The way she dressed was youthful and bright despite the fact that she looked to be about Miyako’s age, and suddenly Aiko was struck with the realization that this had to be the friend that gave her mother the offensively colored fern pot.

“Hey Mi-chan! Got some papers for you to look over!”

Her mother sighed, but Aiko could tell it was fond in nature. “Hi, Ayumi. Thank you.”

The blonde woman—Ayumi—came forward and plopped a stack of files on Miyako’s desk, before turning to look at Aiko (who was sitting on the floor and watching the exchange with interest). “Oh hello, cutie! Your mom has told me so much about you!”

Aiko blinked at being put on the spot. “Hi? I’m Aiko.”

She laughed and crouched down to be closer to Aiko’s level. “Hi! I’m Ayumi, but you can call me Ayu-nee if you want.” She winked. “I’m too young and fun to be an Auntie Ayu yet!”

From above, Miyako sighed. “You’re only a year younger than me, Ayumi.”

At this, Ayumi pouted. “So? I don’t even have a boyfriend, let alone a husband and a kid Mi-chan! I think that qualifies me to be a cool Ayu-nee!”

At this point, Aiko started to tune out of the conversation, closing her eyes again to try and practice with her chakra smoke once more. The buzz of conversation in her ears matched perfectly with the ebb and flow of the adults’ chakra in the room. They seemed to match together well, the rush of warmth and wind teasingly blowing waves in the cool seas at moments and calming down to a nice breeze at others.

It was almost like their chakra was more transparent than their conversation, more clear and readable without confusing phrases or sneaky sarcasm. It was comforting to be enveloped by the feel of waves on a sunny beach, and before she knew it Aiko was drifting off.

She awoke to a gentle bouncing motion and the feel of cool air against her cheek, and as the adult-child opened her eyes blearily her hazy surroundings sharpened into view. Small circles of light danced in her vision, and as she came fully to the waking world she noticed they were street lamps, and that she was propped up against someone’s shoulder.

She shifted her head a little, and dark hair came into view.

_Ah, it’s Mom._

Her guess was confirmed when a warm voice rumbled through the chest she was lying against, saying, “Hi sleepyhead. Did you sleep well? I would have woken you up sooner, but you looked like you didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Aiko mumbled something in assent.

Her mother laughed quietly, and gently patted her daughter’s back. “I thought so.”

Aiko closed her eyes again, warm and safe in Miyako’s arms. Today was good, even if she didn’t get to experience much of it. She hoped tomorrow would be even better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! I hope you enjoyed this installment of DIABOFA, and I hope it wasn’t too short! The title says “(Pt. 1)” so there IS a second and third part of this time with her mom, but I unfortunately do not have those written yet. 
> 
> As always, please drop a kudos or a comment if you enjoyed this chapter, and even drop a comment if you didn't! I try my best to reply to every comment! Remember to drink water and practice self care everybody, you deserve it! :)
> 
> \- Meadows


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